Your essay is actually on pharmaco-medical medicine and psychiatry. “Biomedical” psychiatry also gets to confuse itself with neurology, which few psychiatrists actually seem to understand (but what their premises would seem to suggest is that they actually comprehend the subject well).
Don’t forget promotion of ignorance among the characteristics of psychiatry/psychiatrists. Mental health is one of those career areas where you can be demoted/discharged for successfully treating patients by unapproved and/or irregular means, no matter how complete your patient’s recovery is.
That it should take a committee to discover that the DSM volumes are meaningless drivel doesn’t say much for present-day psychiatry.
Rachel. Maybe the dating adviser shrinks wanted to treat you by exposing you to torments while dating. Picture yourself filled with ambitious optimism dating someone so down they can barely get out of bed. Or you’re the one in the super doldrums while your date is filled with ambitious schemes for building the New Jerusalem. Or both of you are filled with ambitious schemes and gargantuan plans that don’t match each other (when you’re both down, neither of you will want to do anything, except maybe die).
Well, there can be all sorts of chemical imbalances, but many of them take place far from the brain, having more to do with metabolism and digestion than cerebral “owies”, with effective treatments having nothing to do with drugs (or “pure” psychiatry, as far as that goes).
For several years, I’ve been interested in the use of niacinamide in benzo tapering for the following reasons: (1) niacinamide and benzos occupy the same neural sites. (2.) niacinamide has anticonvulsant properties, as does its brother, niacin, which can be used in alcohol withdrawal, greatly shortening the withdrawal period and reducing/eliminating the likelihood of convulsions (I’ve had to supervise two alcohol withdrawals in person, so I’m no stranger to this).
Another incisive study that tells me that antidepressant avoidance is superior to consumption of same and reinforces the heretical notion that Vitamins B1 and/or B3 are a superior replacements for these alleged healing substances, once preliminary analysis eliminates the more exotic sources of depression, like heavy metals, food sensitivities, preexisting metabolic conditions and such.
As my head has cleared over the years, I’ve noticed that the audios I have now, though rare, make sense, unlike the gibberish and insults I used to hear periodically when I was daft.
Why do I keep getting this picture of the blind leading the blind?
This could be difficult. Pseudo-medical psychiatric interventions have a background of centuries of failure treating imaginary causes of psychological distress, but now pseudo-medical treatments can successfully turn raving maniacs into zombies, giving its practitioners reasons to expand their activities. Lots of luck trying to put them in their place.
With proper diagnostic techniques, you wouldn’t need the shrinks at all, as the mysterious mental ailments would be diagnosed using terms common to general medicine, leaving the ghostly shrinks with the more mundane (and likely useful) assignment of haunting closed asylums.
And how was this original (alleged) diagnosis made? Was the magic Ouija Board involved?
Many of the drugs in the MDA family give you a sense of empathy with others when you’re under their influence. These other drugs were likely created when MDA, itself, was outlawed back in the 1967 purge to eliminate hallucinogens, in an attempt to get around said statute, because the individual outlawed drugs were all individually named.
I think that pseudo-medical is a more descriptive term for present-day psychiatry than biomedical.
Maybe a thing, buts it’s something unknown until you take the trouble to find out what’s going on.
There is a DIY part of self help- what you eat. You aren’t going to successfully DIY anything (unless you think DIY going bananas eating junk food is a key to better health) constantly eating stuff that gives you interludes of being too buzzed to think straight.
Maybe there’s something in the French consciousness. The Maginot Line was also a product of French thought. Although it is apparently a great place for growing that French delicacy, mushrooms (except for truffles, of course).
How about using the term syndrome at the end of mentioning the name of one of these alleged diseases; e.g. Schizophrenia syndrome, bipolar syndrome, etc. (which these “diseases” actually are)? I realize the hurried writer’s afraid of wasting precious seconds, but the not so hurried reader would like more linguistic precision.
One thing about these alleged experts on ADHD is how they pay absolutely no attention to things like lead exposure, being willing to zap their patients for hours nightly and/or fill them full of speed for years. Of course it’s a lot cheaper to treat for things like toxic metals, which generates less income for the (pseudo?) provider(s) than zapping and “speed” doping.
I’d have to see what the practitioners’ protocols were to form any judgement on your treatment. This is a realm that’s getting popular with a variety of humbugs, as ignorance of proper practices is rampant (I had great difficulty getting my B3 properly adjusted, my local shrinks being ignorant of this kind of treatment, thus preferring to scold me, instead). Nor does B3 work effectively for all schizophrenia subclasses (the older and more chronic you are, the less effective simple B3 treatments become)
Remember, Steve, that both “depression” and “burnout” are also likely to be the results of depletion of nutrients. In fact, in the most mentioned obvious dietary deficiency diseases- scurvy, beriberi and pellagra- depressed mood is common to all of them. Although constant job stress isn’t going to make you a scurvy knave with all your teeth falling out, it will affect your internal resouces and stress you as a consequence.
The late Abram Hoffer also found Risperdal to be addictive. Evil orthomolecular practitioner that he was, he always tried to get his patients off their antipsychotics if he could, but he could never get them completely off Risperdal without them having flareups, mentioning this in an orthomolecular journal he edited.
His incarceration will definitely be miserable, too. Child molesters are on the bottom of the inmate hierarchy, exaggerated by the number of other convicts molested when they were small children, who are now large and dangerous violent adults.
That’s one reason why child molesting individuals from the professional classes aren’t imprisoned- because they’ll be eaten alive in the “joint”, which is hardly a reason to let them wander about, free.
The problem with the scientists bashing AA is that Bill became pals with Hoffer and Osmond near the end of his life and became a fan of niacin for alcoholic depression, as it relieved his own (and a number of his alcoholic pals’) depressed states. Alas, niacin isn’t a drug, leaving the shrink world to automatically deplore and ignore it, as well as to doubt Bill’s sanity.
Well, when you’re a “mental” patient, you can be easily ignored because your mind has supposedly failed completely, making any thing you say implausible and probably delusional. A patient could easily rid himself of his psychiatrist by monitoring his (her?) movements to discover when the physician’s regularly crossing a busy street. The patient arranges to constantly be on hand until a speeding car is spotted, whereupon the doctor’s informed by the patient to watch out for the speeder; whereupon the doctor will immediately step into the street, knowing the patient is divorced from reality and thereby can’t say anything realistic.
Good thing you didn’t say anything about mega ascorbate and flu prevention. Someone would be filling out the commitment papers in a flash.
Well, of the four proposed theories, the first is the most plausible. Of course, it will be ignored, as it provides pharmaceutical companies no opportunity to push their in-house speed formulation(s) on parents.
This poses a question. Do you go into psychiatry after you self torpedo your internship or your practicum, thereby proving you’re an inept practitioner of ordinary medicine?
Well, for students 9th Grade and up, you could give them annual Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) Tests or Experiential World Inventories, both of which concentrate on inner experiences of the test subject, and one of which (the HOD) has a sub-set that suggest inquiries about suicide. I’m sure your professional readers will brush them off, as Hoffer and Osmond were Black Princes from the Dark Side of psychiatry (according to mainstream psychiatry), but I had an interesting experience while reviewing a group of old protocols I’d accumulated from numerous individuals. I had seven “suicide HODs” from several hundred tests, and the takers of six had made attempts (86%).
It might make sense if you talked about variations instead of A variation. The nutrient dependencies may have genetic influences, but different ones for each dependency are more likely than single “key” ones that affect all of them. The same probably exists for heavy metal poisonings, another cause for schizophrenias, particularly for metals like copper, which is a necessary nutrient in small quantities, but can bring on depression and/or one of the schizophrenias when found in excess. (notice I like to use the plural instead of the singular “schizophrenia”)
Oh boy! I can hardly wait to be drugged into “zombiehood” for my own good.
No surprise here, schizophrenia being but a syndrome with multiple origins and causes. Our not so brilliant researchers are trying to make sense of a syndrome of heterogeneous origin by turning it into a single disease entity.
These WPA guys are only pretending to be medical. Their “medical model” is corrupted with a moral model which has nothing to do with medicine, one of the reason the organization is such a fan of involuntary and destructive “treatments” (antisocial, eh. We’ll just have to beat, drug or zap it out of you if you don’t cooperate).
Both could conceivably be depressed, but you’ve got to be able to get a grasp of their experiential worlds to find out- something mama san certainly hasn’t bothered to explore.
There are certain cues that suggest the presence of depressed moods- such things as perception of time slowing down, constantly feeling misunderstood, the external world becoming dimmer, inappropriate sleep habits, such as insomnia, feeling sluggish and sleepy during the day but not at night. Beware of many diverse distortions, particularly the usual spectaculars- the auditory and extreme visual distortions and hallucinations, as treatments with antidepressants alone can lead to spectacularly bad results if these things exist and the treating practitioner ignores them.
An amazing, but not quite coherent goal. The “mental health” experts want us all to be “shtik” extroverts, lest we all become deteriorated self-centered introverts. I never thought that becoming a shtik anybody could be construed as a healthy state of mind- I’d have to discuss this with legions of Jewish stage entertainers if I wanted to seriously investigate this.
This is the kind of humbug you get when you treat phenomena of multiple origins as though there was only one (that will, no doubt, have a recently patented pharmaceutical alleged cure).
Even more intimidating than you’d expect, because you’re using a copper containing transponder, and one of the “schizophrenias” is brought on by excessive serum copper. I’m sure the authorities will tell us the pills are absolutely safe, because the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs can’t possibly have an effect on the pills.
Reminds me more of “1984”.
Where’s the Speed? During the Vietnam war, methamphetamine was a must in Special Forces camps’ dispensaries. As it left them too wired to function in firefights, the Green Berets preferred to use them in poker games, to keep the players awake overnight, although card games for serious money in a weapon-filled team shack sounds too risky for me.
BC, eh? Maybe you’d better get him to see Frances Fuller, ND (yes, that’s the letter N, not an M). She was Abram Hoffer’s secretary for 30 years, getting a doctorate in naturopathy while she worked for him. He said she had better rapport with his patients than he did, and referred his patients to her when he retired. Her office might still be in Victoria.
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.
Your essay is actually on pharmaco-medical medicine and psychiatry. “Biomedical” psychiatry also gets to confuse itself with neurology, which few psychiatrists actually seem to understand (but what their premises would seem to suggest is that they actually comprehend the subject well).
Don’t forget promotion of ignorance among the characteristics of psychiatry/psychiatrists. Mental health is one of those career areas where you can be demoted/discharged for successfully treating patients by unapproved and/or irregular means, no matter how complete your patient’s recovery is.
That it should take a committee to discover that the DSM volumes are meaningless drivel doesn’t say much for present-day psychiatry.
Rachel. Maybe the dating adviser shrinks wanted to treat you by exposing you to torments while dating. Picture yourself filled with ambitious optimism dating someone so down they can barely get out of bed. Or you’re the one in the super doldrums while your date is filled with ambitious schemes for building the New Jerusalem. Or both of you are filled with ambitious schemes and gargantuan plans that don’t match each other (when you’re both down, neither of you will want to do anything, except maybe die).
Well, there can be all sorts of chemical imbalances, but many of them take place far from the brain, having more to do with metabolism and digestion than cerebral “owies”, with effective treatments having nothing to do with drugs (or “pure” psychiatry, as far as that goes).
For several years, I’ve been interested in the use of niacinamide in benzo tapering for the following reasons: (1) niacinamide and benzos occupy the same neural sites. (2.) niacinamide has anticonvulsant properties, as does its brother, niacin, which can be used in alcohol withdrawal, greatly shortening the withdrawal period and reducing/eliminating the likelihood of convulsions (I’ve had to supervise two alcohol withdrawals in person, so I’m no stranger to this).
Another incisive study that tells me that antidepressant avoidance is superior to consumption of same and reinforces the heretical notion that Vitamins B1 and/or B3 are a superior replacements for these alleged healing substances, once preliminary analysis eliminates the more exotic sources of depression, like heavy metals, food sensitivities, preexisting metabolic conditions and such.
As my head has cleared over the years, I’ve noticed that the audios I have now, though rare, make sense, unlike the gibberish and insults I used to hear periodically when I was daft.
Why do I keep getting this picture of the blind leading the blind?
This could be difficult. Pseudo-medical psychiatric interventions have a background of centuries of failure treating imaginary causes of psychological distress, but now pseudo-medical treatments can successfully turn raving maniacs into zombies, giving its practitioners reasons to expand their activities. Lots of luck trying to put them in their place.
With proper diagnostic techniques, you wouldn’t need the shrinks at all, as the mysterious mental ailments would be diagnosed using terms common to general medicine, leaving the ghostly shrinks with the more mundane (and likely useful) assignment of haunting closed asylums.
And how was this original (alleged) diagnosis made? Was the magic Ouija Board involved?
Many of the drugs in the MDA family give you a sense of empathy with others when you’re under their influence. These other drugs were likely created when MDA, itself, was outlawed back in the 1967 purge to eliminate hallucinogens, in an attempt to get around said statute, because the individual outlawed drugs were all individually named.
I think that pseudo-medical is a more descriptive term for present-day psychiatry than biomedical.
Maybe a thing, buts it’s something unknown until you take the trouble to find out what’s going on.
There is a DIY part of self help- what you eat. You aren’t going to successfully DIY anything (unless you think DIY going bananas eating junk food is a key to better health) constantly eating stuff that gives you interludes of being too buzzed to think straight.
Maybe there’s something in the French consciousness. The Maginot Line was also a product of French thought. Although it is apparently a great place for growing that French delicacy, mushrooms (except for truffles, of course).
How about using the term syndrome at the end of mentioning the name of one of these alleged diseases; e.g. Schizophrenia syndrome, bipolar syndrome, etc. (which these “diseases” actually are)? I realize the hurried writer’s afraid of wasting precious seconds, but the not so hurried reader would like more linguistic precision.
One thing about these alleged experts on ADHD is how they pay absolutely no attention to things like lead exposure, being willing to zap their patients for hours nightly and/or fill them full of speed for years. Of course it’s a lot cheaper to treat for things like toxic metals, which generates less income for the (pseudo?) provider(s) than zapping and “speed” doping.
I’d have to see what the practitioners’ protocols were to form any judgement on your treatment. This is a realm that’s getting popular with a variety of humbugs, as ignorance of proper practices is rampant (I had great difficulty getting my B3 properly adjusted, my local shrinks being ignorant of this kind of treatment, thus preferring to scold me, instead). Nor does B3 work effectively for all schizophrenia subclasses (the older and more chronic you are, the less effective simple B3 treatments become)
Remember, Steve, that both “depression” and “burnout” are also likely to be the results of depletion of nutrients. In fact, in the most mentioned obvious dietary deficiency diseases- scurvy, beriberi and pellagra- depressed mood is common to all of them. Although constant job stress isn’t going to make you a scurvy knave with all your teeth falling out, it will affect your internal resouces and stress you as a consequence.
The late Abram Hoffer also found Risperdal to be addictive. Evil orthomolecular practitioner that he was, he always tried to get his patients off their antipsychotics if he could, but he could never get them completely off Risperdal without them having flareups, mentioning this in an orthomolecular journal he edited.
His incarceration will definitely be miserable, too. Child molesters are on the bottom of the inmate hierarchy, exaggerated by the number of other convicts molested when they were small children, who are now large and dangerous violent adults.
That’s one reason why child molesting individuals from the professional classes aren’t imprisoned- because they’ll be eaten alive in the “joint”, which is hardly a reason to let them wander about, free.
The problem with the scientists bashing AA is that Bill became pals with Hoffer and Osmond near the end of his life and became a fan of niacin for alcoholic depression, as it relieved his own (and a number of his alcoholic pals’) depressed states. Alas, niacin isn’t a drug, leaving the shrink world to automatically deplore and ignore it, as well as to doubt Bill’s sanity.
Well, when you’re a “mental” patient, you can be easily ignored because your mind has supposedly failed completely, making any thing you say implausible and probably delusional. A patient could easily rid himself of his psychiatrist by monitoring his (her?) movements to discover when the physician’s regularly crossing a busy street. The patient arranges to constantly be on hand until a speeding car is spotted, whereupon the doctor’s informed by the patient to watch out for the speeder; whereupon the doctor will immediately step into the street, knowing the patient is divorced from reality and thereby can’t say anything realistic.
Good thing you didn’t say anything about mega ascorbate and flu prevention. Someone would be filling out the commitment papers in a flash.
Well, of the four proposed theories, the first is the most plausible. Of course, it will be ignored, as it provides pharmaceutical companies no opportunity to push their in-house speed formulation(s) on parents.
This poses a question. Do you go into psychiatry after you self torpedo your internship or your practicum, thereby proving you’re an inept practitioner of ordinary medicine?
Well, for students 9th Grade and up, you could give them annual Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) Tests or Experiential World Inventories, both of which concentrate on inner experiences of the test subject, and one of which (the HOD) has a sub-set that suggest inquiries about suicide. I’m sure your professional readers will brush them off, as Hoffer and Osmond were Black Princes from the Dark Side of psychiatry (according to mainstream psychiatry), but I had an interesting experience while reviewing a group of old protocols I’d accumulated from numerous individuals. I had seven “suicide HODs” from several hundred tests, and the takers of six had made attempts (86%).
It might make sense if you talked about variations instead of A variation. The nutrient dependencies may have genetic influences, but different ones for each dependency are more likely than single “key” ones that affect all of them. The same probably exists for heavy metal poisonings, another cause for schizophrenias, particularly for metals like copper, which is a necessary nutrient in small quantities, but can bring on depression and/or one of the schizophrenias when found in excess. (notice I like to use the plural instead of the singular “schizophrenia”)
Oh boy! I can hardly wait to be drugged into “zombiehood” for my own good.
No surprise here, schizophrenia being but a syndrome with multiple origins and causes. Our not so brilliant researchers are trying to make sense of a syndrome of heterogeneous origin by turning it into a single disease entity.
These WPA guys are only pretending to be medical. Their “medical model” is corrupted with a moral model which has nothing to do with medicine, one of the reason the organization is such a fan of involuntary and destructive “treatments” (antisocial, eh. We’ll just have to beat, drug or zap it out of you if you don’t cooperate).
Both could conceivably be depressed, but you’ve got to be able to get a grasp of their experiential worlds to find out- something mama san certainly hasn’t bothered to explore.
There are certain cues that suggest the presence of depressed moods- such things as perception of time slowing down, constantly feeling misunderstood, the external world becoming dimmer, inappropriate sleep habits, such as insomnia, feeling sluggish and sleepy during the day but not at night. Beware of many diverse distortions, particularly the usual spectaculars- the auditory and extreme visual distortions and hallucinations, as treatments with antidepressants alone can lead to spectacularly bad results if these things exist and the treating practitioner ignores them.
An amazing, but not quite coherent goal. The “mental health” experts want us all to be “shtik” extroverts, lest we all become deteriorated self-centered introverts. I never thought that becoming a shtik anybody could be construed as a healthy state of mind- I’d have to discuss this with legions of Jewish stage entertainers if I wanted to seriously investigate this.
This is the kind of humbug you get when you treat phenomena of multiple origins as though there was only one (that will, no doubt, have a recently patented pharmaceutical alleged cure).
Even more intimidating than you’d expect, because you’re using a copper containing transponder, and one of the “schizophrenias” is brought on by excessive serum copper. I’m sure the authorities will tell us the pills are absolutely safe, because the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs can’t possibly have an effect on the pills.
Reminds me more of “1984”.
Where’s the Speed? During the Vietnam war, methamphetamine was a must in Special Forces camps’ dispensaries. As it left them too wired to function in firefights, the Green Berets preferred to use them in poker games, to keep the players awake overnight, although card games for serious money in a weapon-filled team shack sounds too risky for me.
BC, eh? Maybe you’d better get him to see Frances Fuller, ND (yes, that’s the letter N, not an M). She was Abram Hoffer’s secretary for 30 years, getting a doctorate in naturopathy while she worked for him. He said she had better rapport with his patients than he did, and referred his patients to her when he retired. Her office might still be in Victoria.
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.