In these cases, the variety of the drug isn’t the key. The alleged therapist is attempting to produce a specific kind of experience that might otherwise take years of study in an ashram. Being continuously under the influence of the foreign substance isn’t the idea.
Not as dangerous as you might think. The individuals having the bad effects are more likely to be suffering from distorted perceptions prior to consuming a hallucinogenic substance, one reason Hoffer and Osmond devised their infamous HOD test while they were studying psychedelic therapy for alcoholics. Having given HOD tests to a variety of individuals, I find Hoffer and Osmond convincing on this subject and will usually. mention this to high-scoring individuals interested in hallucinogens.
The real problem with these theories of imbalances is that a number of them don’t primarily effect the brain at all. Another problem is that the psychiatrist frequently doesn’t know squat about real medicine, making it likely that he/she will completely miss the problem. For example, a depressed individual who lacks energy, is sensitive to cold and has trouble with unwanted weight gain unimproved by dieting probably won’t respond to antidepressants at all, because their problem isn’t “psychiatric” depression, but more likely an underactive thyroid.
There are a number of such conditions that can deceive the unwary shrink into mistreating them with psych drugs.
It’s hard to say what the subjects thought about their emperors. They invariably had to go through periods of lulus, like Caligula and Nero. They also had to contend with multiple emperors, all demanding your allegiance simultaneously- your head depended on your ability to schmooze your neighborhood emperor until he was assassinated, while simultaneously being ready to cheer the perpetrator without betraying your “attachment” to his predecessor.
Today, it’s more acceptable to have a tombstone that says how wealthy you were when we all went extinct than to actually exert some kind of effort to keep this from happening. Naturally, robots would make your grave site facilities because there’d be no people around to do it.
A genuinely ghastly performance from modern psychiatry- what sounds like an initial job for non-prescription magnesium chloride, and maybe a few grams of (also non-prescription) niacinamide. But then, there aren’t any winter conferences or gifts for not using prescription drugs.
He isn’t familiar with the concept of addictive allergies to foods, where commonly consumed foods can lead to “addictive behavior” and thoughts, in addition to “psychiatric” symptoms. “Mental health” professionals don’t believe in them because they were described by Theron Randolph, who failed to impress the APA with his accounts of experiences with many of his patients, including a demonstration on stage of addictive/allergic reactions on stage, with several of his patients volunteering, to demonstrate their experiences.
The way you handle cops is to give them too much to do. Tails can be led many places, because they have to know what you’re doing. Maybe they’d like to spend the day at the mall, going into every store. Maybe they’d like a leisurely lunch at your favorite buffet as you go repeatedly back and forth from the food line. Talk quietly to many strangers, asking them innocent questions in a low voice, nodding significantly while glancing “suspiciously” around if they say anything in reply. If you smoke, ask your tail for lights. Drive aimlessly, while stopping at many places. Be sure to talk to strangers on the sidewalk while driving, making many stops at different places afterwards. Let them have a busy day, full of minor activities they can report. Always maintain a sunny disposition as you can, particularly if you have to talk to them.
The tardive dyskinesia can (likely) be treated with manganese salts, even though it’s induced by antidepressants instead of “antipsychotic” drugs. I do know that the orthomolecular folks have used it for a while, even though that means conventional shrinks never will and bombard you with outrage if you ask.
One of the first things you have to know is that drug companies would no more like to see you withdraw from their products than that guy selling narcotics on the corner would like to see you stop consuming his products- the urge to keep their profits is too great.
Don’t forget nutrient therapy, particularly the idea of starting it BEFORE introducing someone to benzos. I realize this sounds pedestrian, but extreme emotions can have either a physical origin or can be alleviated with a proper nutrient program if you know what you have to use to replace deficiencies or dependencies that are giving someone an exaggerated response to stressors, particularly of the type you’re going to encounter in the field.
Hospitals do have a peculiar attitude about ETC. The gent who adjusted my B3 about 45 years ago, had been an ECT doc in the southern part of my state. Since he wasn’t a real psychiatrist, but an internist, he probably got into the use of mega B3 to preserve his patients’ memories, making the practice at least somewhat less appalling than it usually is.
Since he wasn’t a shrink, he also became interested in cerebral allergies and water-assisted fasting therapy, which he studied under Theron Randolph, one of the Grand Old Men of allergies, who trained his pupils by having them water fast for several days and introducing test meals of single foods over a period of days. This is what he hoped to do in his new job, but the hospital objected, saying fasting therapy was too dangerous, even in its own hospital. Apparently, the hospital thought ECT a safe treatment, but not water fasting. (no, I didn’t have any ECT and my appointment was free, as he was just setting up his office).
The embarrassing thing about this is that you probably could lower the rate of “CHR” individuals losing their marbles by pretreating them with a basic 3g/day of B3 and C instead of antipsychotic drugs.
But then manufacturers wouldn’t make any money, the most important element of present-day psychiatric treatment.
I’ve wondered for some time if niacinamide would be useful in benzo withdrawal because both classes of neurochemical use the same receptor sites. Its close family member, niacin (nicotinic acid for you pharmacology types) safely speeds up alcohol withdrawal to within a few days- I’ve used it in a withdrawal at an individual’s home (!!!?) successfully, though I wouldn’t recommend it for self-withdrawal.
Sounds good to me. And the one thing they all seem to believe is that psychosis is a unitary entity that they shall conquer when they find out what it is. Thus their “studies” are faulty before the actual work designed to prove their hypotheses even begins, as their groups are always mixed.
Well, going on antidepressants and losing your marbles two weeks or so later isn’t due to placebo effects, but inept screening, maybe with one of those company-issued “screening” sheets that doesn’t inquire about perceptual distortions.
Well, Steve, you and I both know that DSM “diagnoses” are pretty useless in the first place, as they tell you little or nothing about what’s actually going on with an individual, plus nothing about what proper treatments should be, should you actually chance to know what the problem is.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. These tests were created to sell antidepressants, not to find out what an adolescent’s mental state actually is, leaving plenty of opportunities to misdiagnose, which wouldn’t be too bad if this misdiagnosis didn’t lead to incompetent treatment that would lead to some kind of disaster involving “mismedication” with adolescents suffering from dysperceptions.
But there is in many cases. It’s the dietary use of manganese salts along with your taper. A Richard Kunin, MD, has been using manganese salts for dyskinesias since the 1980’s, as have some of the orthomolecular guys. He had a website naming the conditions he treated, tardive dyskinesia being one of them. I don’t know if he’s still around- he must be close to fossilization if he is.
Not examining psych patients probably deserves an inspiring motto. Maybe something like-“treatment failure begins here!”
Better to think of it as pharmacological psychiatry, as real medicine takes a back seat in conventional psychiatry. Think Pseudo-medical psychiatry, where the attempt is to push drugs and disabling treatments to cure the financial ailments of pharmaceutical companies and device providers.
Another thing hospital staff loathes is the knowledgeable patient, particularly one who knows his/her psych drugs as well, or (gasp) maybe better than staff do. Staff doesn’t like it if you can snap off side effects better than they can or if you can point out that somebody’s “quirk” that is actually a tic that nobody realized, and you’re only a patient. The therapist can become humiliated, while the doctor can suspect that you’re actually a plant or agent introduced by some nameless authority to spy on them. Another nice touch is to have a regular visitor who takes you over to some corner and then converses in low tones, punctuated by bursts of laughter (when asked, neither of you will say or admit to anything).
The article makes sense, as the cop style, as taught, just invites action based on distorted perception of the officer as a caricature martinet, space alien, robot or any other sort of caricature being- not the way to be talking someone into a facility, which is likely to be another story in strangeness.
This is where people like us come in, particularly if there are a number of us with a variety of “diagnoses” and some have had adventures where we were stranded among the aliens, giving us a good idea how to act in a tense time like that. What we need is somewhere to take the distraught that is somewhere better than the hospital, with its intense lighting and harried staff rushing everywhere.
I think I recall that Mr. Guiteau had neurosyphilis to assist his “reasoning” that his failure to find government employment was President Garfield’s fault
The HOD test came about after Hoffer’s first medical appointment as Director of Psychiatric Research in Saskatchewan. He was looking for a psychological test he could use to monitor experimental patients’ progress. As none existed, he decided to create one.
Osmond had come to Saskatchewan because he couldn’t stand the psychiatric climate in Great Britain. He became clinical supervisor and later superintendent of a mental hospital in Weyburn, one of the worst mental hospitals in the world at the time (visiting WHO rep). He’d been exposed to both the notion that the behavior of “schizophrenics” was the result of “normal” reactions to unusual perceptions and that the odd perceptions would recede as patients got better. He’d also had mescaline in England in the late 1940’s and used his experience as a framework for making Weyburn into a real hospital.
This was the climate in which the HOD test was born. The idea was simple- quantitative measurement as a test of mental status. It never initially caught on, as these were the salad days of psychoanalysis and biological beliefs about unusual mental states were in the doghouse, as well as being too prosaic for the psychoanalytic mind.
I got mine during a period in my life when I got interested in local hallucinogenic mushrooms and was interested in giving samples to others after testing them, myself. When I found out I was schizophrenic (I found I was B3 dependent, at any rate) is when I became interested in orthomolecular medicine.
I don’t know where you can get one now (I simply made copies of the scoring sheets instead of buying new ones). Besides, you can get an improved version, called the Experiential World Inventory, devised by Osmond and a gent with the last name, El Melighi. I think a Behavioral Science Press does that one, but you’d better do a computer search. There’s also an Orthomolecular.org website where you might be able to find out.
They must be lying to themselves, thinking this is a solution to depression, a group of signs and symptoms rather than an actual disease. Though it does give experimenters a chance to make failure pay off.
I wonder if the Harvard geniuses looked at the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (the HOD test). Probably not, as Hoffer and Osmond were the evil geniuses of psychiatry back in their salad days, using niacin and vitamin C as the basis for treating the dysperceptive.
I have a copy of this test, which has a subsection where the authors state the tester should inquire about suicidal thoughts in the individual being tested. A couple of years ago, I went through the dozens of protocols I had (100 plus?) and found all of five “suicide HOD’s”. Every one of the five had attempted suicide (I knew most of the testees’ histories).
But then those guys were the accursed Black Princes of psychiatry, abhorred by respectable shrinks, who wished they’d go away because “everyone knew” that vitamins had no role in the treatment of “schizophrenia syndrome”. That they’d both used hallucinogenic drugs before they became “respectable” confirmed the psychiatric beliefs of the day.
You can actually guesstimate the likelihood of patient violence if you take the time to find out details of your patient/client/interviewee’s experiential world. It can even be a clue to what nutrients to use to reassemble your individual’s scattered wits, should you know what symptomologies appear with certain deficiencies, dependencies and excesses.
Yes, but it’s bad for the old dignity to be too connected to reality, or else you’d have a hard time getting and/or keeping those important corporate sponsors.
I had several interesting chats with a shock doc, one with an ominous message. He wasn’t a shrink by training and was moving to a small rural hospital where he was hoping to treat cerebral allergies with water fasting and rotation diets (he was also familiar with orthomolecular therapy- I was referred by members of a schizophrenia association). And he did tell me how to adjust my B3 use.
The ominous message was that the hospital mavens thought fasting and dietary modification was too dangerous and exotic to be practiced at their institution, a general hospital- but ECT was apparently fine (I think he did them all at his previous place of employment). I was lucky as he was only in the area a few days, hoping to set up an office, so my visits were free.
There are personalized treatments for “depression”, but they don’t involve drugs. That’s because there are multiple sources for depressed moods, and the treatments have to address the proper sources to be successful.
Well, antipsychotics antagonize manganese, a necessary trace element to prevent tardive dyskinesia with its many tics and twitches that make life on “medications” difficult and embarrassing. This is also what makes them a sorry long-term treatment, as the likelihood of neurological problems increases with the length of exposure to “antipsychotics”.
You’ve heard the story-“get a bigger hammer!”
Maybe his knowledge was fictional.
And the title of the movie was? Get a Bigger Hammer!
It helps with the absorption of zinc. I realize it gives you dreams and you’re taking too much if your dreams become spectacular technicolor events.
Isn’t the FDA’s job to get new (patentable) drugs on the market whether or not they actually work the way they’re supposed to? If a new drug gets you buzzed, its commercial potential is so great the public has got to have it.
Since you received counseling, I think I might chip in with a few questions probably peculiar to me.
1. Do you have white spots in your fingernails?
2. Do you remember your dreams?
3. Do your fingernails seem soft?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m looking for signs you might be low in the mineral zinc, which is deeply involved in sexual functioning. Although you should see a professional interested in true biological medicine (not this tacky drug stuff- “pseudo-biological” drugging), if the items are true, a suggested program should definitely involve zinc supplementation, with B6 to help its absorption, if necessary, and maybe B100’s on general principles. Your first aim should be to remember dreams, if you don’t now, and titer the B6 until you do.
It isn’t generally understood that you can (to a degree) find out in advance if you’re likely to have bad reactions to cannabis and/or the hallucinogens. The old Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic helps in this respect. Being a quantitative test, you can almost find out by weighing your “true” answers without examining what they are (it was used in Saskatchewan as a screening method for LSD therapy until the DEA got uppity and forced the province to quit therapeutic use of LSD, which was a standard treatment for alcoholism there).
When dealing with straight people, I find that it’s best for me to observe in the persona of a spy. As a spy, particularly one who takes vitamins, I certainly don’t want to give myself away to potentially judgmental straight people, who might call out the militia if I get too strange.
If I wanted to be diagnostic, I’d think of something like prodromal senility (demonstrated by the inability to lie consistently about the same subject?), but I don’t know if it has a DSM number.
If I were permitted to use antidepressants, the first thing I’d look for is the number and frequency of perceptual distortions my would be patient was experiencing, as the chances of bad antidepressant experiences goes up with the increased number (and kind) of distortions the would-be patient is experiencing.
Well, there are substances that can correct thought disordered notions, but they’re things like niacin, NAD, glutamine, ascorbate, B6, etc., but there’s one thing that makes them dangerous to psychiatrists- none of them can be patented, which means no office toys, trips to the sunny South for winter pharmaceutical company conventions, no opportunity to be a contributor to pharma-sponsored articles. You’d have to get your patients well, without the impetus of toys, professional status increase and pre-paid vacations- a brutal challenge, because otherwise you could get them while your patients became chronic (under present circumstances).
Well, you’re dealing with a guy who consumes a gram of caffeine/day and lives on a diet of Big Macs and Fish Witches. I don’t know if the guy has a diagnosis, but I do know why he stays up at 3AM sending Tweets to the universe at large, in circumstances where I wouldn’t expect deep thoughts to be revealed or linguistic brilliancies to be uttered.
Well, a shrink isn’t going to tell you he doesn’t know what’s going on, which is why his supposed treatment failed. Financially and psychologically better for the pro (by his/her own standards) to say you’re treatment resistant than the shrink telling you outright that he doesn’t know enough about your condition to treat it properly, nor does he know anyone who does.
When I was more involved with “mental health” activities, I used to find depressed individuals who experienced numerous perceptual distortions. When treated with B3 and C for the distortions, their moods would improve- misdiagnosing going on that missed proper treatment?
But a few alcoholics realize they need pharmacologically adequate amounts of niacin to send the heebie jeebies away in 24 hours, which it does.
This merely demonstrates the kind of fumbling you get when you mistake a syndrome for an actual disease. Since there can be a variety of causes for “depression”, it would be foolish to presume a “one treatment fits all” approach to have much, if any value. It would be as foolish as believing that one hat size fits all or that one waist size will create pants that fit everyone (creating amusement for the spectator, but embarrassment for most wearers).
They can also have “cerebral allergies”, where certain foods get them buzzed. Water fasting for several days is the usual method of prepping for the test meals. This technique goes back to Theron Randolph (MD’s) salad days (he was an early allergist who used to teach his techniques to professional students by having them fast and then test themselves for allergic reactions).
Zyprexa had better not be on the list of acceptable “medications” for this alleged disorder. I once made a speaker’s day when she asked which antidepressant had the side effect of excessive weight gain and I gave her the correct answer.
I’m not very profound, as some of the regulars may tell you, but I do know that the antipsychotic movement problems (dyskinesia, akathisia) you and others might be having can (at least sometimes) be treated with manganese salts, preferably by an orthomolecular medical guy, but I can propose a starter program if you can’t find a practitioner (you don’t want to do this without guidance, as manganese can do bad things in excess).
Steve. The lab coats bearing the manufacturers’ “colors” or trademarks are an impressive idea. That way, we’d easily know the point of the studies or lectures, although it would be a much more impressive spectacle if there were cheerleaders, as well.
Not necessarily. The hosts were unprepared for the white coat antics, so they couldn’t game the gamester by having Dr. L walk into a room where everyone was wearing a white coat. Perhaps the “house” coats should have had a certain emblem on them, so that the hosts could insist that L’s coat had the emblem, too, which would give the sponsors the ability to loan him one of their coats- preferably one that was too big, to give the observer the sensation that the Doc was trying to grow into it (though a too small coat, if the Doc was big, would give him the impression of being a restaurant chef or a barber). Gamesmanship is more fun when everybody’s playing.
Well, it may not make sense for the chump eating the speed, but it makes excellent sense to the company’s accounting department.
He’s looking to become President for Life, once he turns the US into a Third World nation like the Philippines or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He can even be President for Longer than Life, as Trump-bots can succeed him for centuries, because his shallow thought can be easily duplicated in a robotic brain with today’s technology.
Brilliant plan. Sell Speed for the eating disorder and then sell antipsychotics to those who are now hallucinating because of the Speed.
I must be at death’s door. I haven’t had an antipsychotic in 35 years.
The hidden drill sergeant found in everybody who has a chance to call him out?
Of course the brilliant researchers aren’t going to find anything, because they’re thinking of “schizophrenia” as a single entity instead of a collection of signs and symptoms that may have any number of origins.
Maybe a better term is physical illnesses with “mental” (subtle neurological) symptoms. The dietary deficiency diseases are of physical origin, but they frequently instigate mental changes before the more classic physical symptoms appear.
Nothing new here, but I’m glad it’s finally catching on in psychiatry at large- at least the part that isn’t on the hook to drug manufacturers.
Actually, I’ve suspected that something like that was going on. I do find it depressing that so many of these informational sites are actually pharma pawns- not good if you have numerous perceptual distortions in addition to being constantly depressed. Then you DON’T want to buy the sponsor’s product unless you think that hallucinating and bouncing off the walls is better than simply being depressed.
How many of this multitude of sites posited multiple causes for depressive syndromes or even posited that “depression” is a syndrome and not a disease unto itself?
At intervals, Abram Hoffer used to propose the creation of a government agency that would do nothing except evaluate researcher claims. The above article establishes a rationale for such an organization, given the antics used by companies to “justify” their “research” endeavors.
Appears to be thrashing in an attempt to justify the expense of creating and attempting to prove that a worthless drug has therapeutic value- got to be some way to justify a couple million bucks going into the toilet.
It’s likely that drug-induced manganese deficiency has a role in promoting tardive dyskinesias, as Richard Kunin noticed about 35 years ago, after successfully treating 14 out of a series of 15 patients with the condition by using manganese salts. The other orthomolecular guys have since taken it up, guaranteeing that you’ll have permanent cases among patients receiving conventional drug treatments, instead.
While they’re at it, why don’t they have machine patients as well? That way they can have 100% treatment successes.
The answer’s easy, of course. The psychiatrist treats your bank account by transferring your money into his account, after reciting confusing spells to convince you he’s doing something constructive, and/or prescribing drugs to leave you delirious, unaware that you enriched him/her.
Well, this is “science medicine”, so the findings only have to benefit clients who are equipment manufacturers and the experimenters, themselves- those who will benefit financially and professionally. The “patients” are simply experimental animals, like mice, rats or monkeys. That they’re human is only important when publishing the results.
Maybe it means that the investigators can still find angels to finance them.
It doesn’t justify it, but it suggests what a proper treatment is likely to be, as well as what it SHOULDN’T be (no stimulants, no “therapeutic” mind games, no junk food, etc.).
Here’s an entertaining bit for you, OH. Back in the 1990’s, I worked as an RA in a halfway house for substance abusers. One night I was called in by the residents(!?), as a new hire had run a resident to the ER (he’d deliberately sliced one of this wrists) without taking care of the rest of them. The next day at work, I was fretting about a similar incident happening on my time, which would involve packing everybody up for a hospital trip (I worked evenings), possibly twice, if the hospital said the patient was ready to go’ leaving the day staff with a group of sleepyheads liable to be punished if they fell asleep during daytime “therapeutic” activities, under the guise of discipline.
While I was fretting, I had a last audio (“you don’t have to put up with this,” it said). Minutes later another resident walked up to me, asking-“do you think I’m schizophrenic?” Although I couldn’t answer, I chanced to have my HOD test with me, which I gave him (he was in the test’s “schizophrenic range”). I encouraged him to read the volume *How to Live with Schizophrenia* and said I’d monitor his niacinamide for him if he wanted, which gave me an entry to do the same for his self-harming fellow.
Both of them graduated from the program while on B3, whereupon I was called before the Director and the Clinical Supervisor. My “patients” were supposed to become treatment failures and the poobahs were going to can me because they weren’t, but they wanted to know how I caused them to graduate. Alas, my finances were too decrepit to miss my unemployment, so I didn’t want them to know anything (my unemployment was at stake) that would threaten my getting it (I wasn’t going to give them a proper cause for canning me).
I can treat some schizophrenia related conditions better than our local shrinks, so I keep a low profile to avoid arrest and don’t advertise. My “mental” health background had plenty of crisis intervention in it, making my function in treatment (if I decide to do it) resemble that of the medic in a forward military unit. (You’ll survive the trip to the rear, but the rest is up to you).
We could all become Buddhists and thereby assume suffering is a universal part of everyone’s life, so we should all accept constant suffering and misery as an irrecoverable normal condition for those shunning the Buddha’s path.
How about “perceptually challenged?”
Yes, but that would likely mean using a lot of supplemental Vitamin C, which would indicate the presence of some long-standing neurotic desire that would have to be medicated out of existence, in order to make you a safe zombie.
I know, but if I used a better term, like “metabolic dysperception”, you’d likely become confused. Then I’d have to further confuse you with terms like heavy metal poisoning, vitamin dependencies, cerebral allergies and such.
The powers that be would be a lot less eager to turn the coronavirus loose on the public if they knew that schizophrenics, despite their elevated death rate compared to straight people, are less likely to contract viral illnesses than those individuals who aren’t schizophrenic. They can die of many things, but viruses aren’t one of them, making them one up on their detractors in this respect.
Reminds me of being in the army in Vietnam and having to maintain the interval between me and my neighbors while traveling on foot.
It would be appropriate to inform the GP’s that depression isn’t a disease, but a syndrome ( a recurring collection of signs and symptoms)that can have multiple causes. Since shrinks are frequently out of their leagues when it comes to general medicine, it’s the duty of the GP to quickly tease out the alternative ailments that (A) aren’t responsive to psych drugs, and (B) will respond to “ordinary” medical treatments before reaching for his prescription pad to prescribe an SSRI (or other) antidepressants.
Not quite, Fiachra. “Borderline personality disorder” is just as likely to mean-“I don’t know what’s going on here, but it must be something consequential.”
Since I’m familiar with drugless treatments for “mental” illnesses, I find the pharma ads for psych drugs truly ignorant in concept and scope. I don’t know whether to be bewildered or outraged when I see ads promoting useless benzos as cure-alls for anxieties of one sort or another, particularly when some detail is mentioned that I’d see as a clue for the actual real treatment, but instead is used as a cue for the sponsor’s relentless drugging “therapy”.
This is why I refer to what other bloggers call biomedical as pseudomedical, instead, because it has no relationship to “real” medicine, the kind you get when you’re obviously afflicted with a physical illness.
This is why I take my B3 every day. I don’t have to fight the urge to fly off the handle and I don’t look daffy, nor am I twitching and ticcing from some kind of dyskinesia. Nor am I sleeping 15 hours/day.
R. Gordon Wasson, early authority on the anthropology of mushrooms, thought that the Berserkers got that way by getting buzzed on Fly Amanita mushrooms, which contain anticholinergic hallucinogens. There definitely was something unusual about them, because prior to a fight, they’d be deployed far in front of the Vikings’ main body, where the missile troops could turn them into pincushions if they went after the wrong enemy.
Well, Rachel, the doctor didn’t want to tell you he fumbled your treatment from the getgo, which is why you’re still symptomatic. That would be hard on his professional self impression, as well as his pool of patients- he wouldn’t want evidence of his blunders to come out in the waiting room.
I prefer to think of depression as a syndrome- a collection of symptoms and signs, that, in this case, can have multiple causes. The reason psychiatric treatments for depressed moods are frequently so futile and useless is because psychiatrists are chained to the idea that depression is some kind of unitary entity that responds to a single (chemotherapeutic) treatment.
Doctors from Mars! They’re busy prescribing in your community today! Catch them now before they return to their own planet!
Well, the late Abram Hoffer altered his “labeling” a number of years before he quit psychiatry, calling his “schizophrenics” niacin dependent pellagrins (he was one of the fathers of mega-niacin therapy). His postpartum “depressives” became copper-induced depressions. But then he was never a psychiatrist by training, and was amazed by the antics he saw when his province (Saskatchewan- the province had made him Director of Psychiatric Research) sent him to various famous psych research institutes to acquaint him with psychiatric beliefs and practices.
There is a substance (kryptopyrolle) that appears in the urine of certain patients. Psychiatry ignores it, because patients excreting large quantities of it don’t have consistent DSM diagnoses, despite the dysperceptions that all the group members have, and that B6 and zinc in proper quantities will successfully treat all the varied diagnoses inflicted on the patients. (see the late Carl Pfeiffer’s volumes for more detail on the subject).
There is a substance (kryptopyrolle) that appears in the urine of certain patients. Psychiatry ignores it, because patients excreting large quantities of it don’t have consistent DSM diagnoses, despite the dysperceptions that all the group members have, and that B6 and zinc in proper quantities will successfully treat all the varied diagnoses inflicted on the patients. (see Carl Pfeiffer’s volumes for more detail on the subject).
Well, Pete, your work has probably got these distinguished medicos placing you in the Granola Crowd of crazed naturopaths who oppose all medical drug use, even though many of these “depressions” can be successfully treated by dangerous substances like vitamins B1, B3, B6 and B12. What doubtlessly makes them dangerous is your inability to kill yourself with them, unlike the antidepressants, where suicide by OD is quite common.
We’ve got to have derogatory labels, particularly the “schizophrenics”, who are not only daft, but have at least partial immunity to viral diseases and cancer (when unmedicated), and don’t succumb from wound shock, as they’re resistant to it. How can crazy people have these good qualities unless they got them from the Devil, so they can annoy the world’s Decent Citizens without letup?
Those of us inhabiting the Dark Side of psychiatry know that it takes longer to treat you if you become chronic, but it’s still probable if you’re given correct treatments, although it takes longer to recover.
The Insurance Cure in action.
Sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know if they’d put up with nutrient therapy for PTSD should one of the peers espouse it.
Before the 19th Century mental institutions silted up with chronic patients, gardening was considered an essential element of the Moral Treatment of the day.
Lady Gaga will find out about olanzapine once she puts on the major poundage (tonnage?) this drug is famous for inducing.
That’s why you don’t pay attention to company-funded studies that will always puff the effectiveness of the drugs they’re manufacturing, while hiding the disabling side effects to puff future sales. Think of the companies’ “studies” as advertising instead of science, as advertising doesn’t have to be truthful about anything unless governments force this undesirable practice on companies.
Unfortunately I’m sensitive to caffeine, making tea drinking unacceptable unless I want to quarrel with friends and make an angry spectacle of myself. If I want to exchange thoughts and feelings with someone, I’d better stick to herbal teas.
In these cases, the variety of the drug isn’t the key. The alleged therapist is attempting to produce a specific kind of experience that might otherwise take years of study in an ashram. Being continuously under the influence of the foreign substance isn’t the idea.
Not as dangerous as you might think. The individuals having the bad effects are more likely to be suffering from distorted perceptions prior to consuming a hallucinogenic substance, one reason Hoffer and Osmond devised their infamous HOD test while they were studying psychedelic therapy for alcoholics. Having given HOD tests to a variety of individuals, I find Hoffer and Osmond convincing on this subject and will usually. mention this to high-scoring individuals interested in hallucinogens.
The real problem with these theories of imbalances is that a number of them don’t primarily effect the brain at all. Another problem is that the psychiatrist frequently doesn’t know squat about real medicine, making it likely that he/she will completely miss the problem. For example, a depressed individual who lacks energy, is sensitive to cold and has trouble with unwanted weight gain unimproved by dieting probably won’t respond to antidepressants at all, because their problem isn’t “psychiatric” depression, but more likely an underactive thyroid.
There are a number of such conditions that can deceive the unwary shrink into mistreating them with psych drugs.
It’s hard to say what the subjects thought about their emperors. They invariably had to go through periods of lulus, like Caligula and Nero. They also had to contend with multiple emperors, all demanding your allegiance simultaneously- your head depended on your ability to schmooze your neighborhood emperor until he was assassinated, while simultaneously being ready to cheer the perpetrator without betraying your “attachment” to his predecessor.
Today, it’s more acceptable to have a tombstone that says how wealthy you were when we all went extinct than to actually exert some kind of effort to keep this from happening. Naturally, robots would make your grave site facilities because there’d be no people around to do it.
A genuinely ghastly performance from modern psychiatry- what sounds like an initial job for non-prescription magnesium chloride, and maybe a few grams of (also non-prescription) niacinamide. But then, there aren’t any winter conferences or gifts for not using prescription drugs.
He isn’t familiar with the concept of addictive allergies to foods, where commonly consumed foods can lead to “addictive behavior” and thoughts, in addition to “psychiatric” symptoms. “Mental health” professionals don’t believe in them because they were described by Theron Randolph, who failed to impress the APA with his accounts of experiences with many of his patients, including a demonstration on stage of addictive/allergic reactions on stage, with several of his patients volunteering, to demonstrate their experiences.
The way you handle cops is to give them too much to do. Tails can be led many places, because they have to know what you’re doing. Maybe they’d like to spend the day at the mall, going into every store. Maybe they’d like a leisurely lunch at your favorite buffet as you go repeatedly back and forth from the food line. Talk quietly to many strangers, asking them innocent questions in a low voice, nodding significantly while glancing “suspiciously” around if they say anything in reply. If you smoke, ask your tail for lights. Drive aimlessly, while stopping at many places. Be sure to talk to strangers on the sidewalk while driving, making many stops at different places afterwards. Let them have a busy day, full of minor activities they can report. Always maintain a sunny disposition as you can, particularly if you have to talk to them.
The tardive dyskinesia can (likely) be treated with manganese salts, even though it’s induced by antidepressants instead of “antipsychotic” drugs. I do know that the orthomolecular folks have used it for a while, even though that means conventional shrinks never will and bombard you with outrage if you ask.
One of the first things you have to know is that drug companies would no more like to see you withdraw from their products than that guy selling narcotics on the corner would like to see you stop consuming his products- the urge to keep their profits is too great.
Don’t forget nutrient therapy, particularly the idea of starting it BEFORE introducing someone to benzos. I realize this sounds pedestrian, but extreme emotions can have either a physical origin or can be alleviated with a proper nutrient program if you know what you have to use to replace deficiencies or dependencies that are giving someone an exaggerated response to stressors, particularly of the type you’re going to encounter in the field.
Hospitals do have a peculiar attitude about ETC. The gent who adjusted my B3 about 45 years ago, had been an ECT doc in the southern part of my state. Since he wasn’t a real psychiatrist, but an internist, he probably got into the use of mega B3 to preserve his patients’ memories, making the practice at least somewhat less appalling than it usually is.
Since he wasn’t a shrink, he also became interested in cerebral allergies and water-assisted fasting therapy, which he studied under Theron Randolph, one of the Grand Old Men of allergies, who trained his pupils by having them water fast for several days and introducing test meals of single foods over a period of days. This is what he hoped to do in his new job, but the hospital objected, saying fasting therapy was too dangerous, even in its own hospital. Apparently, the hospital thought ECT a safe treatment, but not water fasting. (no, I didn’t have any ECT and my appointment was free, as he was just setting up his office).
The embarrassing thing about this is that you probably could lower the rate of “CHR” individuals losing their marbles by pretreating them with a basic 3g/day of B3 and C instead of antipsychotic drugs.
But then manufacturers wouldn’t make any money, the most important element of present-day psychiatric treatment.
I’ve wondered for some time if niacinamide would be useful in benzo withdrawal because both classes of neurochemical use the same receptor sites. Its close family member, niacin (nicotinic acid for you pharmacology types) safely speeds up alcohol withdrawal to within a few days- I’ve used it in a withdrawal at an individual’s home (!!!?) successfully, though I wouldn’t recommend it for self-withdrawal.
Sounds good to me. And the one thing they all seem to believe is that psychosis is a unitary entity that they shall conquer when they find out what it is. Thus their “studies” are faulty before the actual work designed to prove their hypotheses even begins, as their groups are always mixed.
Well, going on antidepressants and losing your marbles two weeks or so later isn’t due to placebo effects, but inept screening, maybe with one of those company-issued “screening” sheets that doesn’t inquire about perceptual distortions.
Well, Steve, you and I both know that DSM “diagnoses” are pretty useless in the first place, as they tell you little or nothing about what’s actually going on with an individual, plus nothing about what proper treatments should be, should you actually chance to know what the problem is.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. These tests were created to sell antidepressants, not to find out what an adolescent’s mental state actually is, leaving plenty of opportunities to misdiagnose, which wouldn’t be too bad if this misdiagnosis didn’t lead to incompetent treatment that would lead to some kind of disaster involving “mismedication” with adolescents suffering from dysperceptions.
But there is in many cases. It’s the dietary use of manganese salts along with your taper. A Richard Kunin, MD, has been using manganese salts for dyskinesias since the 1980’s, as have some of the orthomolecular guys. He had a website naming the conditions he treated, tardive dyskinesia being one of them. I don’t know if he’s still around- he must be close to fossilization if he is.
Not examining psych patients probably deserves an inspiring motto. Maybe something like-“treatment failure begins here!”
Better to think of it as pharmacological psychiatry, as real medicine takes a back seat in conventional psychiatry. Think Pseudo-medical psychiatry, where the attempt is to push drugs and disabling treatments to cure the financial ailments of pharmaceutical companies and device providers.
Another thing hospital staff loathes is the knowledgeable patient, particularly one who knows his/her psych drugs as well, or (gasp) maybe better than staff do. Staff doesn’t like it if you can snap off side effects better than they can or if you can point out that somebody’s “quirk” that is actually a tic that nobody realized, and you’re only a patient. The therapist can become humiliated, while the doctor can suspect that you’re actually a plant or agent introduced by some nameless authority to spy on them. Another nice touch is to have a regular visitor who takes you over to some corner and then converses in low tones, punctuated by bursts of laughter (when asked, neither of you will say or admit to anything).
The article makes sense, as the cop style, as taught, just invites action based on distorted perception of the officer as a caricature martinet, space alien, robot or any other sort of caricature being- not the way to be talking someone into a facility, which is likely to be another story in strangeness.
This is where people like us come in, particularly if there are a number of us with a variety of “diagnoses” and some have had adventures where we were stranded among the aliens, giving us a good idea how to act in a tense time like that. What we need is somewhere to take the distraught that is somewhere better than the hospital, with its intense lighting and harried staff rushing everywhere.
I think I recall that Mr. Guiteau had neurosyphilis to assist his “reasoning” that his failure to find government employment was President Garfield’s fault
The HOD test came about after Hoffer’s first medical appointment as Director of Psychiatric Research in Saskatchewan. He was looking for a psychological test he could use to monitor experimental patients’ progress. As none existed, he decided to create one.
Osmond had come to Saskatchewan because he couldn’t stand the psychiatric climate in Great Britain. He became clinical supervisor and later superintendent of a mental hospital in Weyburn, one of the worst mental hospitals in the world at the time (visiting WHO rep). He’d been exposed to both the notion that the behavior of “schizophrenics” was the result of “normal” reactions to unusual perceptions and that the odd perceptions would recede as patients got better. He’d also had mescaline in England in the late 1940’s and used his experience as a framework for making Weyburn into a real hospital.
This was the climate in which the HOD test was born. The idea was simple- quantitative measurement as a test of mental status. It never initially caught on, as these were the salad days of psychoanalysis and biological beliefs about unusual mental states were in the doghouse, as well as being too prosaic for the psychoanalytic mind.
I got mine during a period in my life when I got interested in local hallucinogenic mushrooms and was interested in giving samples to others after testing them, myself. When I found out I was schizophrenic (I found I was B3 dependent, at any rate) is when I became interested in orthomolecular medicine.
I don’t know where you can get one now (I simply made copies of the scoring sheets instead of buying new ones). Besides, you can get an improved version, called the Experiential World Inventory, devised by Osmond and a gent with the last name, El Melighi. I think a Behavioral Science Press does that one, but you’d better do a computer search. There’s also an Orthomolecular.org website where you might be able to find out.
They must be lying to themselves, thinking this is a solution to depression, a group of signs and symptoms rather than an actual disease. Though it does give experimenters a chance to make failure pay off.
I wonder if the Harvard geniuses looked at the Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (the HOD test). Probably not, as Hoffer and Osmond were the evil geniuses of psychiatry back in their salad days, using niacin and vitamin C as the basis for treating the dysperceptive.
I have a copy of this test, which has a subsection where the authors state the tester should inquire about suicidal thoughts in the individual being tested. A couple of years ago, I went through the dozens of protocols I had (100 plus?) and found all of five “suicide HOD’s”. Every one of the five had attempted suicide (I knew most of the testees’ histories).
But then those guys were the accursed Black Princes of psychiatry, abhorred by respectable shrinks, who wished they’d go away because “everyone knew” that vitamins had no role in the treatment of “schizophrenia syndrome”. That they’d both used hallucinogenic drugs before they became “respectable” confirmed the psychiatric beliefs of the day.
You can actually guesstimate the likelihood of patient violence if you take the time to find out details of your patient/client/interviewee’s experiential world. It can even be a clue to what nutrients to use to reassemble your individual’s scattered wits, should you know what symptomologies appear with certain deficiencies, dependencies and excesses.
Yes, but it’s bad for the old dignity to be too connected to reality, or else you’d have a hard time getting and/or keeping those important corporate sponsors.
I had several interesting chats with a shock doc, one with an ominous message. He wasn’t a shrink by training and was moving to a small rural hospital where he was hoping to treat cerebral allergies with water fasting and rotation diets (he was also familiar with orthomolecular therapy- I was referred by members of a schizophrenia association). And he did tell me how to adjust my B3 use.
The ominous message was that the hospital mavens thought fasting and dietary modification was too dangerous and exotic to be practiced at their institution, a general hospital- but ECT was apparently fine (I think he did them all at his previous place of employment). I was lucky as he was only in the area a few days, hoping to set up an office, so my visits were free.
There are personalized treatments for “depression”, but they don’t involve drugs. That’s because there are multiple sources for depressed moods, and the treatments have to address the proper sources to be successful.
Well, antipsychotics antagonize manganese, a necessary trace element to prevent tardive dyskinesia with its many tics and twitches that make life on “medications” difficult and embarrassing. This is also what makes them a sorry long-term treatment, as the likelihood of neurological problems increases with the length of exposure to “antipsychotics”.
You’ve heard the story-“get a bigger hammer!”
Maybe his knowledge was fictional.
And the title of the movie was? Get a Bigger Hammer!
It helps with the absorption of zinc. I realize it gives you dreams and you’re taking too much if your dreams become spectacular technicolor events.
Isn’t the FDA’s job to get new (patentable) drugs on the market whether or not they actually work the way they’re supposed to? If a new drug gets you buzzed, its commercial potential is so great the public has got to have it.
Since you received counseling, I think I might chip in with a few questions probably peculiar to me.
1. Do you have white spots in your fingernails?
2. Do you remember your dreams?
3. Do your fingernails seem soft?
The reason I’m asking is that I’m looking for signs you might be low in the mineral zinc, which is deeply involved in sexual functioning. Although you should see a professional interested in true biological medicine (not this tacky drug stuff- “pseudo-biological” drugging), if the items are true, a suggested program should definitely involve zinc supplementation, with B6 to help its absorption, if necessary, and maybe B100’s on general principles. Your first aim should be to remember dreams, if you don’t now, and titer the B6 until you do.
It isn’t generally understood that you can (to a degree) find out in advance if you’re likely to have bad reactions to cannabis and/or the hallucinogens. The old Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic helps in this respect. Being a quantitative test, you can almost find out by weighing your “true” answers without examining what they are (it was used in Saskatchewan as a screening method for LSD therapy until the DEA got uppity and forced the province to quit therapeutic use of LSD, which was a standard treatment for alcoholism there).
When dealing with straight people, I find that it’s best for me to observe in the persona of a spy. As a spy, particularly one who takes vitamins, I certainly don’t want to give myself away to potentially judgmental straight people, who might call out the militia if I get too strange.
If I wanted to be diagnostic, I’d think of something like prodromal senility (demonstrated by the inability to lie consistently about the same subject?), but I don’t know if it has a DSM number.
If I were permitted to use antidepressants, the first thing I’d look for is the number and frequency of perceptual distortions my would be patient was experiencing, as the chances of bad antidepressant experiences goes up with the increased number (and kind) of distortions the would-be patient is experiencing.
Well, there are substances that can correct thought disordered notions, but they’re things like niacin, NAD, glutamine, ascorbate, B6, etc., but there’s one thing that makes them dangerous to psychiatrists- none of them can be patented, which means no office toys, trips to the sunny South for winter pharmaceutical company conventions, no opportunity to be a contributor to pharma-sponsored articles. You’d have to get your patients well, without the impetus of toys, professional status increase and pre-paid vacations- a brutal challenge, because otherwise you could get them while your patients became chronic (under present circumstances).
Well, you’re dealing with a guy who consumes a gram of caffeine/day and lives on a diet of Big Macs and Fish Witches. I don’t know if the guy has a diagnosis, but I do know why he stays up at 3AM sending Tweets to the universe at large, in circumstances where I wouldn’t expect deep thoughts to be revealed or linguistic brilliancies to be uttered.
Well, a shrink isn’t going to tell you he doesn’t know what’s going on, which is why his supposed treatment failed. Financially and psychologically better for the pro (by his/her own standards) to say you’re treatment resistant than the shrink telling you outright that he doesn’t know enough about your condition to treat it properly, nor does he know anyone who does.
When I was more involved with “mental health” activities, I used to find depressed individuals who experienced numerous perceptual distortions. When treated with B3 and C for the distortions, their moods would improve- misdiagnosing going on that missed proper treatment?
But a few alcoholics realize they need pharmacologically adequate amounts of niacin to send the heebie jeebies away in 24 hours, which it does.
This merely demonstrates the kind of fumbling you get when you mistake a syndrome for an actual disease. Since there can be a variety of causes for “depression”, it would be foolish to presume a “one treatment fits all” approach to have much, if any value. It would be as foolish as believing that one hat size fits all or that one waist size will create pants that fit everyone (creating amusement for the spectator, but embarrassment for most wearers).
They can also have “cerebral allergies”, where certain foods get them buzzed. Water fasting for several days is the usual method of prepping for the test meals. This technique goes back to Theron Randolph (MD’s) salad days (he was an early allergist who used to teach his techniques to professional students by having them fast and then test themselves for allergic reactions).
Zyprexa had better not be on the list of acceptable “medications” for this alleged disorder. I once made a speaker’s day when she asked which antidepressant had the side effect of excessive weight gain and I gave her the correct answer.
I’m not very profound, as some of the regulars may tell you, but I do know that the antipsychotic movement problems (dyskinesia, akathisia) you and others might be having can (at least sometimes) be treated with manganese salts, preferably by an orthomolecular medical guy, but I can propose a starter program if you can’t find a practitioner (you don’t want to do this without guidance, as manganese can do bad things in excess).
Steve. The lab coats bearing the manufacturers’ “colors” or trademarks are an impressive idea. That way, we’d easily know the point of the studies or lectures, although it would be a much more impressive spectacle if there were cheerleaders, as well.
Not necessarily. The hosts were unprepared for the white coat antics, so they couldn’t game the gamester by having Dr. L walk into a room where everyone was wearing a white coat. Perhaps the “house” coats should have had a certain emblem on them, so that the hosts could insist that L’s coat had the emblem, too, which would give the sponsors the ability to loan him one of their coats- preferably one that was too big, to give the observer the sensation that the Doc was trying to grow into it (though a too small coat, if the Doc was big, would give him the impression of being a restaurant chef or a barber). Gamesmanship is more fun when everybody’s playing.
Well, it may not make sense for the chump eating the speed, but it makes excellent sense to the company’s accounting department.
He’s looking to become President for Life, once he turns the US into a Third World nation like the Philippines or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He can even be President for Longer than Life, as Trump-bots can succeed him for centuries, because his shallow thought can be easily duplicated in a robotic brain with today’s technology.
Brilliant plan. Sell Speed for the eating disorder and then sell antipsychotics to those who are now hallucinating because of the Speed.
I must be at death’s door. I haven’t had an antipsychotic in 35 years.
The hidden drill sergeant found in everybody who has a chance to call him out?
Of course the brilliant researchers aren’t going to find anything, because they’re thinking of “schizophrenia” as a single entity instead of a collection of signs and symptoms that may have any number of origins.
Maybe a better term is physical illnesses with “mental” (subtle neurological) symptoms. The dietary deficiency diseases are of physical origin, but they frequently instigate mental changes before the more classic physical symptoms appear.
Nothing new here, but I’m glad it’s finally catching on in psychiatry at large- at least the part that isn’t on the hook to drug manufacturers.
Actually, I’ve suspected that something like that was going on. I do find it depressing that so many of these informational sites are actually pharma pawns- not good if you have numerous perceptual distortions in addition to being constantly depressed. Then you DON’T want to buy the sponsor’s product unless you think that hallucinating and bouncing off the walls is better than simply being depressed.
How many of this multitude of sites posited multiple causes for depressive syndromes or even posited that “depression” is a syndrome and not a disease unto itself?
At intervals, Abram Hoffer used to propose the creation of a government agency that would do nothing except evaluate researcher claims. The above article establishes a rationale for such an organization, given the antics used by companies to “justify” their “research” endeavors.
Appears to be thrashing in an attempt to justify the expense of creating and attempting to prove that a worthless drug has therapeutic value- got to be some way to justify a couple million bucks going into the toilet.
It’s likely that drug-induced manganese deficiency has a role in promoting tardive dyskinesias, as Richard Kunin noticed about 35 years ago, after successfully treating 14 out of a series of 15 patients with the condition by using manganese salts. The other orthomolecular guys have since taken it up, guaranteeing that you’ll have permanent cases among patients receiving conventional drug treatments, instead.
While they’re at it, why don’t they have machine patients as well? That way they can have 100% treatment successes.
The answer’s easy, of course. The psychiatrist treats your bank account by transferring your money into his account, after reciting confusing spells to convince you he’s doing something constructive, and/or prescribing drugs to leave you delirious, unaware that you enriched him/her.
Well, this is “science medicine”, so the findings only have to benefit clients who are equipment manufacturers and the experimenters, themselves- those who will benefit financially and professionally. The “patients” are simply experimental animals, like mice, rats or monkeys. That they’re human is only important when publishing the results.
Maybe it means that the investigators can still find angels to finance them.
It doesn’t justify it, but it suggests what a proper treatment is likely to be, as well as what it SHOULDN’T be (no stimulants, no “therapeutic” mind games, no junk food, etc.).
Here’s an entertaining bit for you, OH. Back in the 1990’s, I worked as an RA in a halfway house for substance abusers. One night I was called in by the residents(!?), as a new hire had run a resident to the ER (he’d deliberately sliced one of this wrists) without taking care of the rest of them. The next day at work, I was fretting about a similar incident happening on my time, which would involve packing everybody up for a hospital trip (I worked evenings), possibly twice, if the hospital said the patient was ready to go’ leaving the day staff with a group of sleepyheads liable to be punished if they fell asleep during daytime “therapeutic” activities, under the guise of discipline.
While I was fretting, I had a last audio (“you don’t have to put up with this,” it said). Minutes later another resident walked up to me, asking-“do you think I’m schizophrenic?” Although I couldn’t answer, I chanced to have my HOD test with me, which I gave him (he was in the test’s “schizophrenic range”). I encouraged him to read the volume *How to Live with Schizophrenia* and said I’d monitor his niacinamide for him if he wanted, which gave me an entry to do the same for his self-harming fellow.
Both of them graduated from the program while on B3, whereupon I was called before the Director and the Clinical Supervisor. My “patients” were supposed to become treatment failures and the poobahs were going to can me because they weren’t, but they wanted to know how I caused them to graduate. Alas, my finances were too decrepit to miss my unemployment, so I didn’t want them to know anything (my unemployment was at stake) that would threaten my getting it (I wasn’t going to give them a proper cause for canning me).
I can treat some schizophrenia related conditions better than our local shrinks, so I keep a low profile to avoid arrest and don’t advertise. My “mental” health background had plenty of crisis intervention in it, making my function in treatment (if I decide to do it) resemble that of the medic in a forward military unit. (You’ll survive the trip to the rear, but the rest is up to you).
We could all become Buddhists and thereby assume suffering is a universal part of everyone’s life, so we should all accept constant suffering and misery as an irrecoverable normal condition for those shunning the Buddha’s path.
How about “perceptually challenged?”
Yes, but that would likely mean using a lot of supplemental Vitamin C, which would indicate the presence of some long-standing neurotic desire that would have to be medicated out of existence, in order to make you a safe zombie.
I know, but if I used a better term, like “metabolic dysperception”, you’d likely become confused. Then I’d have to further confuse you with terms like heavy metal poisoning, vitamin dependencies, cerebral allergies and such.
The powers that be would be a lot less eager to turn the coronavirus loose on the public if they knew that schizophrenics, despite their elevated death rate compared to straight people, are less likely to contract viral illnesses than those individuals who aren’t schizophrenic. They can die of many things, but viruses aren’t one of them, making them one up on their detractors in this respect.
Reminds me of being in the army in Vietnam and having to maintain the interval between me and my neighbors while traveling on foot.
It would be appropriate to inform the GP’s that depression isn’t a disease, but a syndrome ( a recurring collection of signs and symptoms)that can have multiple causes. Since shrinks are frequently out of their leagues when it comes to general medicine, it’s the duty of the GP to quickly tease out the alternative ailments that (A) aren’t responsive to psych drugs, and (B) will respond to “ordinary” medical treatments before reaching for his prescription pad to prescribe an SSRI (or other) antidepressants.
Not quite, Fiachra. “Borderline personality disorder” is just as likely to mean-“I don’t know what’s going on here, but it must be something consequential.”
Since I’m familiar with drugless treatments for “mental” illnesses, I find the pharma ads for psych drugs truly ignorant in concept and scope. I don’t know whether to be bewildered or outraged when I see ads promoting useless benzos as cure-alls for anxieties of one sort or another, particularly when some detail is mentioned that I’d see as a clue for the actual real treatment, but instead is used as a cue for the sponsor’s relentless drugging “therapy”.
This is why I refer to what other bloggers call biomedical as pseudomedical, instead, because it has no relationship to “real” medicine, the kind you get when you’re obviously afflicted with a physical illness.
This is why I take my B3 every day. I don’t have to fight the urge to fly off the handle and I don’t look daffy, nor am I twitching and ticcing from some kind of dyskinesia. Nor am I sleeping 15 hours/day.
R. Gordon Wasson, early authority on the anthropology of mushrooms, thought that the Berserkers got that way by getting buzzed on Fly Amanita mushrooms, which contain anticholinergic hallucinogens. There definitely was something unusual about them, because prior to a fight, they’d be deployed far in front of the Vikings’ main body, where the missile troops could turn them into pincushions if they went after the wrong enemy.
Well, Rachel, the doctor didn’t want to tell you he fumbled your treatment from the getgo, which is why you’re still symptomatic. That would be hard on his professional self impression, as well as his pool of patients- he wouldn’t want evidence of his blunders to come out in the waiting room.
I prefer to think of depression as a syndrome- a collection of symptoms and signs, that, in this case, can have multiple causes. The reason psychiatric treatments for depressed moods are frequently so futile and useless is because psychiatrists are chained to the idea that depression is some kind of unitary entity that responds to a single (chemotherapeutic) treatment.
Doctors from Mars! They’re busy prescribing in your community today! Catch them now before they return to their own planet!
Well, the late Abram Hoffer altered his “labeling” a number of years before he quit psychiatry, calling his “schizophrenics” niacin dependent pellagrins (he was one of the fathers of mega-niacin therapy). His postpartum “depressives” became copper-induced depressions. But then he was never a psychiatrist by training, and was amazed by the antics he saw when his province (Saskatchewan- the province had made him Director of Psychiatric Research) sent him to various famous psych research institutes to acquaint him with psychiatric beliefs and practices.
There is a substance (kryptopyrolle) that appears in the urine of certain patients. Psychiatry ignores it, because patients excreting large quantities of it don’t have consistent DSM diagnoses, despite the dysperceptions that all the group members have, and that B6 and zinc in proper quantities will successfully treat all the varied diagnoses inflicted on the patients. (see the late Carl Pfeiffer’s volumes for more detail on the subject).
There is a substance (kryptopyrolle) that appears in the urine of certain patients. Psychiatry ignores it, because patients excreting large quantities of it don’t have consistent DSM diagnoses, despite the dysperceptions that all the group members have, and that B6 and zinc in proper quantities will successfully treat all the varied diagnoses inflicted on the patients. (see Carl Pfeiffer’s volumes for more detail on the subject).
Well, Pete, your work has probably got these distinguished medicos placing you in the Granola Crowd of crazed naturopaths who oppose all medical drug use, even though many of these “depressions” can be successfully treated by dangerous substances like vitamins B1, B3, B6 and B12. What doubtlessly makes them dangerous is your inability to kill yourself with them, unlike the antidepressants, where suicide by OD is quite common.
We’ve got to have derogatory labels, particularly the “schizophrenics”, who are not only daft, but have at least partial immunity to viral diseases and cancer (when unmedicated), and don’t succumb from wound shock, as they’re resistant to it. How can crazy people have these good qualities unless they got them from the Devil, so they can annoy the world’s Decent Citizens without letup?
Those of us inhabiting the Dark Side of psychiatry know that it takes longer to treat you if you become chronic, but it’s still probable if you’re given correct treatments, although it takes longer to recover.
The Insurance Cure in action.
Sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know if they’d put up with nutrient therapy for PTSD should one of the peers espouse it.
Before the 19th Century mental institutions silted up with chronic patients, gardening was considered an essential element of the Moral Treatment of the day.
Lady Gaga will find out about olanzapine once she puts on the major poundage (tonnage?) this drug is famous for inducing.
That’s why you don’t pay attention to company-funded studies that will always puff the effectiveness of the drugs they’re manufacturing, while hiding the disabling side effects to puff future sales. Think of the companies’ “studies” as advertising instead of science, as advertising doesn’t have to be truthful about anything unless governments force this undesirable practice on companies.
Unfortunately I’m sensitive to caffeine, making tea drinking unacceptable unless I want to quarrel with friends and make an angry spectacle of myself. If I want to exchange thoughts and feelings with someone, I’d better stick to herbal teas.