Psychiatrists don’t necessarily do well at identifying biological ailments that produce “psychiatric” signs. I remember from many years ago when a patient’s hair turned green while he was a “psychiatric” patient in a state institution. He’d been in there for years, yet nobody noticed he had Wilson’s Disease until the excess copper in his hair oxidized, revealing his condition at last.
The reasoning behind these notions is pretty sad, as psychiatric “diagnoses” are just behavioral descriptions that tell you nothing about their causes.
“Mauve Factor” is a good example. Psychiatrists don’t believe it has any validity because it shows up in a variety of “diagnostic” categories, even though the symptomology of these patients is constant, no matter what “diagnostic” groups they’re placed into (and all will respond to treatment with mega B6 and zinc, no matter what “diagnostic” group they’re place into).
Is it slowly sinking into shrink awareness that the DSM’s aren’t good for diagnosing anything, much less something that pertains to actual actual successful treatments? It seems to be taking quite a while.
The question is whether these cognitive deficits were around before or after cannabis use. Sometimes recreational drugs are consumed to make a miserable experience less so. Such individuals will seldom to never stop using them if their mental functioning isn’t simultaneously improved.
Well, if you’re still on the antidepressant, I’d suggest using megascorbate (a la Linus Pauling) instead of OTC cold “remedies” if you get another upper respiratory virus.
I wonder if this whole miserable scene was initiated by double anticholinergics, (1) the Prozac, and (2) the cold medicine, which doubtlessly contained at least one antihistamine.
You’ve got to realize that, in the United States, psychiatry tends to be the specialty choice for those with the worst grades in their med school classes.
That you could make numerous off the cuff remarks about depression demonstrates that someone’s thinking about a disease, rather than a syndrome with numerous possible origins. Dr. Pies shows no evidence of realizing this, when he makes these sight-unseen diagnoses after saying they’re not possible.
The East Asian martial arts were created by Buddhist monks. You don’t want any old sap to be carrying several ounces of gold, that you need to give your Buddha sculpture a skin, to your monastery deep in the mountains.
How are you going to discover the genetic roots of the standard psychiatric “diagnoses” when they aren’t diagnoses at all, but behavioral descriptions? If I can find multiple causes for each of these supposed diagnoses, how is simple genetic testing going to reach any understanding of the “diagnoses” themselves?
I doubt if these concepts will induce me to stop taking B3 every day.
Hoffer also had had LSD. I believe I found out from a piece in The Hallucinogens, a very rare out-of-print volume he and Osmond wrote in 1967 (that devoted 120 pages to LSD).
The book is hard to find. If the other owners are like me, they’re more likely to shoot you rather than lend their copies out.
It’s no surprise that psychiatric diagnosticians haven’t made any progress with severe “mental” illnesses. Their “diagnostic” categories are invariably inhabitants of the diagnostic wastebasket, where syndromes are real, but their “diagnoses” aren’t.
I don’t know about oppression inducing suicides, but I do know that incompetent prescribing does. Most shrinks don’t inquire about unusual perceptual events when diagnosing depressed patients, so they miss depressed individuals who are simultaneously experiencing a number of perceptual distortions, mistakenly prescribing antidepressants for them and making the distorted perceptions worse.
Hoffer and Osmond had interesting backgrounds. Hoffer wasn’t a psychiatrist at all. When the province of Saskatchewan offered him his first psych job as Director of Psychiatric research for the province, they sent him to various psychiatric schools and facilities to give him a grasp of 1950’s psychiatry. Late in his career he developed vitamin programs for cancer patients.
Osmond spent World War II as a ship’s surgeon on convoy escorts, after (foolishly?) asking the Admiralty for a shrink’s job on board one of the larger naval units. When he went to Canada, he became superintendent of Weyburn Hospital (at the time, one of the world’s worst mental institutions), doing novel things like converting the hospital’s seclusion rooms into refuges for those with sensory overloads (I know some of the contributors might be shocked to hear that there were patients who had to be talked out of hanging out in them instead of fighting not to be put into them).
Both of them had used hallucinogens of various kinds (Osmond took peyote while participating in a native ceremony). Both were involved in psychedelic therapy for alcoholism, which became routine in the province until the US DEA put pressure on the province’s government to cease and desist from giving patients LSD.
When they saw your sheet, they “knew” you were into some kind of mischief because they saw that “psych” label on your sheet. They’re guys I wouldn’t care to have around- to act that way, particularly if they expressed psychiatric smugness, would make me a candidate for jail, and the interrogator a candidate for a sudden outbreak of Fist-to-Nose disease.
Were I a therapist of some kind, I’d want to know about the nature of the panics, plus the nature of the individual’s experiential world. Although the money might be better in prolonged psychotherapy, I’d be embarrassed beyond comprehension if I found out my client actually suffered from some kind of magnesium deficiency or a mental state responsive to megavitamin and/or mineral supplements.
Few have subscribed to the notion that delusions are attempts to understand the meaning of altered perceptions and that you might have the same or similar delusions were your perceptions altered in the same way. This is why you need to understand people’s experiential worlds before you pontificate about their “delusions”.
Well, these guys are better off than the Schizophrenics Anonymous chapters, which only lasted if the members took their megavitamins regularly.
You’ve got to remember that Hoffer’s case load was filled with other people’s treatment failures who were referred to him for that very reason. They were the folks likely to wind up on antipsychotics for some time, unless he could pull them free of them.
Well, Steve, depression is a proud resident of the diagnostic wastebasket, while a multitude of physical and psychic causes haunt the landscape of low moods. Some of them, like copper intoxication, or lead poisoning, wouldn’t even rate a psychiatric diagnosis (a good thing, as general medicine has treatments for such ailments).
Well, Steve, depression is a proud resident of the diagnostic wastebasket, while a multitude of physical and psychic causes haunt the landscape of low moods. Some of them, like copper intoxication, or lead poisoning, wouldn’t even rate a psychiatric diagnosis (a good thing, as general medicine has treatments for such ailments). (Duplicate)
Well, it was a wonder drug all right. You’re probably still wondering why they prescribed it in the first place.
Why do psychiatrists repeatedly use drugs that are bad for patients? Because the salesman who visits the psych’s office tells them it’s OK, that’s why. If the shrink is one of those guys who got into psychiatry because the pharmacology classes were too tough, he’ll willingly agree to whatever the company rep (who never even studied pharmacology) tells him.
Yes, he got the idea from Richard Kunin.
One reason I sometimes think of myself as a secret agent instead of a psychiatric consumer. And my mission is to disrupt psychiatry by providing cheap alternatives to allegedly therapeutic drugs (shh).
Another problem comes from not properly examining the “depressed”, which is where the examiner fails to look deeper into a patient’s depressed state and prescribes the wrong medication, a serious problem if the “depressed” patient actually has distorted perceptions. Such individuals can be turned from “depressed” to floridly psychotic by antidepressant therapy, leaving the shrink to devise bizarre explanations for this outcome (and cover up his/her negligence).
The big headache with present-day “neuro-biological” psychiatry is that almost all experimental work in this field is done as attempts to sell drugs that the sponsoring company is trying to get (or keep) on the market. Conditions that lend themselves to drugless treatments are ignored or belittled in the attempts to get that patent that will generate the Big Bucks for the company and its stock.
Yes, but remember that calling him your therapy dog gets him into the restaurant.
They’re probably hoping that the government will pay. Psych patients on drugs aren’t exactly at the top of the income ladder.
It was actually 44 years ago, in an article by Kunin in the old Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry (now the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine).
In a comment on a previous article on the subject, I mentioned seeing an article about manganese 30 or so years ago. I was wrong- the piece was in a 1976 Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry (or Medicine as it had a name change). If you want to see it, it’s on archive at the Orthomolecular.org site, which allows you to see back issues. You can look up tardive dyskinesia as a subject, Richard Kunin’s works as an author.
So harsh on psychiatry? Don’t you know that BPD’s a proud inhabitant of the diagnostic wastebasket?
Another thing big-time mental health frequently dismiss is that “mental illnesses” can be caused or aggravated by physical things going on outside the brain. Diet-related conditions are the most obvious- the mental changes occurring during pellagra, beriberi and scurvy are well known, but not apparently by psychiatrists. Malfunctioning thyroids can produce ailments that resemble “psychiatric” conditions, including catatonia and mania, depending on just how active one’s thyroid is- I wonder how many of MIA “user” readers were asked about glandular function if they were diagnosed manic or catatonic.
Learn to collect them yourself, if you have access to pastures. The easily recognizable P. Cubensis only grows in the South, so you’ll have to know your varieties if you’re going to wander northern pastures, where such mushrooms are smaller and less likely to stain blue, the most striking feature of P. Cubensis.
No, but it might help to have some 500mg. or 1 gram niacin tablets around the house. Remember, you’re likely to break out in flushing with them unless you take your B3 everyday, although that wouldn’t be a problem with niacinamide, which seldom induces flushing.
Washington state, I believe. Actually, it was foolish to try to outlaw hallucinogenic mushrooms in Washington state in the first place, because there were so many common varieties, some of which grew on lawns and in grassy parks. You would have to dig up and/or apply fungicide to every lawn in the state.
I should be deliriously excited about this new and doubtlessly expensive drug, but I came across an article by a Richard Kunin, MD 30 years or so ago about the use of manganese salts (and sometimes niacin) for this very purpose. This can’t be valuable, because members of the orthomolecular community quickly took it up. Besides, it’s cheap, so it defies mainline psychopharmacology, which only seeks to develop drugs more expensive than their predecessors to create their therapeutic breakthroughs.
No, psychiatry, itself, is stranded in Jurassic World.
But there are benefits in prescribing antidepressants! These are the profits coming to pharma and opinion leaders, measurable in dollars and cents. The patients are expendable- they are crazy, after all.
Well put, Ekaterina.
And all of big-time psychiatry was aghast at the thought of using megavitamins B3 and C for schizophrenias instead of the alleged wonder phenothiazines (the vitamins might be dangerous!), because they didn’t change you from florid psychosis to zombie overnight.
They don’t think so much about the right to kill you, than the need to “super-medicate” you, using doses as high as they think plausible, raising them if you complain (surely a sign of impending relapse to an ineffectual initial dose). Maybe they also think that dying is a deliberate self attempt to foil your own recovery at their expense.
Interestingly enough, Bill Wilson, himself, wanted go beyond AA meetings as tools for sobriety, and began to correspond with the Saskatchewan group headed by Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, who were studying psychedelic therapy in the treatment of alcoholism and the use of megadose niacin in the suppression of the DT’s. Bill had already taken it once in hospital surroundings, and, I believe, had Osmond turn him on at his home. After he found out that niacin stabilized his moods, he became a great advocate for it (he’d persuaded 30 of his AA buddies to try it to get their opinion), and for several years just before his death, had a foldout on it inserted into copies of the Big Book being sent out.
Well, if you delivered proper services as a peer, you’d find yourself out on the street, accused of blasphemy, or even worse, sorcery, if your proper services got your charges to improve but didn’t use standard psychiatric methods that your employers approved of.
How could you expect antidepressants to work consistently if you know that “depression” is only a syndrome- a collection of signs and symptoms that could be the result of one or more of a number of conditions with different causes with differing proper treatments? Some of these conditions are even made worse by antidepressants, which will lead the “average” shrinks to look for plausible excuses to exonerate themselves from blame for prescribing a faulty treatment that led their depressed patients to become floridly psychotic.
I notice that these studies make no attempt to find out what’s inducing “ADHD”. In particular, they’re paying no attention to lead intoxication, which closely mimics this aforementioned condition. But that takes work, such as sending hair and serum samples to a laboratory- better to pile on the stimulants, paying no attention to unpleasant thoughts that all your medicating might be in vain. Better to rely on chestnuts like the patient staying hyperactive because (s)he doesn’t want to get well.
The doctors were suffering from terminal Mental Health Mind when they gave him olanzapine, which they did because he didn’t want them to. Terminal Mental Health Mind kicked in, in which the staff believed the kid was refusing meds because they were benefitting him in some mysterious way, so he was retreating from sanity as part of a Flight into Illness. His very reluctance was the very reason these brilliant professionals had to medicate him with that very same drug.
Well, they do if they take their vitamins and avoid stimulants, sucrose and allergy inducing foods, while tapering off any psych meds they might be on.
If you’re talking about stimulant withdrawal, the method is to use multi-gram doses of vitamin C to antagonize the jumpers, plus large amounts of vitamin B1 to counteract the “need for speed” that may cause relapses. I could supervise this, myself, if I had to (I’ve overseen much more dangerous home alcohol withdrawals), but your best bet would be a naturopathic or an orthomolecular practitioner.
The “psycho-medical” model you describe is on its last legs, but studying the biological conditions that lead to “psychiatric diagnoses” is likely just beginning. This means that your future “psychiatrist” will need to have a extensive knowledge of psychiatric trivia to be able to grasp a proper diagnosis and treatment for his patients’ mental state (no more immediately treating fat people extremely sensitive to cold with SSRI’s- or any other antidepressant, for that matter).
Borderline Personality Disorder is a proud occupant of the diagnostic wastebasket. This article helps to demonstrate why, and also why it will remain there.
The docility of a bowl of custard.
One of my favorites concerning diagnostic testing was a commentary about a urine test for B6 zinc dependency. The critic was dismissive because a variety of “diagnostic” categories responded to the same deficiency. The thought that the alleged diagnostic categories might not be reliable, instead, completely eluded him, even though the symptomology was similar among all the “categories”, and the successful treatment was constant.
Well, The present approach toward mental illnesses today is that they aren’t, frequently coming from a variety of physical causes. The alleged diagnostic categories are just descriptions of certain mental states that say nothing about how they should be treated. It’s no surprise there are no certain diagnostic tests.
This should be no surprise as antipsychotics induce brain damage in their subjects- brain damage, which increases the longer that antipsychotics are used.
I take it that the idea of having the psychologists suggest nutrients they might use for symptomatic relief is far too revolutionary for the esteemed medicos to even think about.
I can think of nutrient treatments for drug-related dysfunctions, such as niacin and/or glutamine for alcoholism and vitamins C and B1 for stimulant related dysfunctions but this “drugs for the dopers” stuff has me baffled, particularly in the cases of pharmaceutical treatments for pharmaceutical addictions.
I’m not impressed. Since the “diagnostic categories” aren’t real, it’s likely that the “treatments” will be equally fantastic.
Well, there have been advances in treatment for negative medical states, but Big Time Psychiatry has fought like tigers to make them go away as they don’t rely on ever more exotic drugs and zapping patients into even more violent seizure states. The companies are just as outraged because you can buy some of these items off the shelf for a fraction of the cost of exotic “curative” drugs. Just say “megavitamins” to your neighborhood shrink and see what happens if you don’t believe the above paragraph.
Sorry to have become such a menace to society, since I haven’t had a psych drug for 35+ years.
You can get supplemental manganese in health food stores, apparently usually sold in 10mg. tablets. Were I obliged to oversee a trial, I’d start with 10mg./day for a week, then 20mg. for a week or two, then 30mg./day. I’d stop if the movements got worse, as excess manganese can produce extrapyramidal symptoms.
I noticed that your crusaders didn’t go after the orthomolecular guys with the same vigor when they went after you. Of course, the orthomolecular types are more interested in real medicine than “psychiatric medicine” and use physical testing such as trace mineral analysis as diagnostic aids. Their patients frequently don’t have a psychiatric status, but will be diagnosed with physical ailments.
They’re some of the greater menaces to Big Time Psychiatry in recent decades and will become more so, as “psychiatric” diseases disappear to be replaced by garden variety physical ones.
Her serum copper’s likely to be high in these circumstances, leading to a depressed mood that probably can’t be successfully treated with antipsychotics, ECT, etc., although zinc and B6 will likely be therapeutic (which the shrinks will ignore as they “know” vitamins and minerals have nothing to do with your mental functioning).
Well, that’s no surprise. That’s the pharmaceutical drug business in action.
If you wanted to be catty, you might ask the therapist if (s)he found Bartlett’s Big Book of Familiar Quotations a profound source of therapeutic guidance.
It would seem preposterous to claim that any disease caused by microorganisms could be blocked by stimulant consumption, which exhausts individuals physically and chemically (immune and recovery response stuff).
That would be a good idea, but I thought we were commemorating a guy singularly short of good ideas.
They don’t help patients, but they can do wonders for pharmaceutical companies’ bank accounts and subsequent stock prices.
No, they aren’t “mental illnesses”, but understanding their chemistry and proper nutrient therapy can provide a useful means of dealing with them, particularly since they’re considered incurable, like “schizophrenia” and “depression” still are.
Maybe we should turn the anniversary of his death into National Zombie Day, during which people with unused medications around the house should take big enough doses to spend the day as zombies in memory of this great man and his therapeutic ambitions.
Maybe he actually died of disappointment because we’re not semiconscious and sleeping 15-16 hours a day. What geeks we are!
Gotta remember boans, that I’m one of those weirdos who takes his niacin every day and avoids shrinks like the plague, knowing that they’d see vitamin consumption as the sign of serious pending delirium. I also read Forbidden Literature, in which “mental” illnesses don’t exist except as indicators for unusual physically based conditions- in fact, the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry changed its name to the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine a few years back- it’s third name change since it first appeared 60 or so years ago, I believe, and now devotes much of its space to such illnesses as HIV and ebola.
It might be interesting to note that Stanislas Grof was (and maybe is) the only individual who had permission to dispense LSD in both Western and East bloc nations during the Cold War.
Oh, there’s room for biomedical models, all right, but not for psychiatric pseudo diseases like “schizophrenia”‘ “depression” and such, but for directly identifying underlying physical causes for the states that are thus “diagnosed” in psych terms, such as lead poisoning for hyperactivity and mania wherein the symptoms lead to the identification of the cause and correct treatment.
Historic, most likely. Sounds like a relic of the days when prescriptions were written in Latin, so patients wouldn’t know squat about the drugs they were getting.
“Concentrating on the meds” would not only be likely to separate you from others, but from yourself, as well. That’s one of the things akathisia’s all about.
He picked it up from R. Kunin, MD, featuring this treatment in an edition of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which he edited at the time.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that paranoid notions in individuals arise as an attempt to explain why unusual perceptual experiences are going on- the beliefs would be rational if the perceptions were real, but, alas, they aren’t. This is most obvious in chronic stimulant consumption, notorious for inducing paranoid notions quickly.
It would be better if you could get these individuals to adopt magnesium deficient diets, so they could experience panic disorder firsthand, while simultaneously treating it ineptly with their own “chemotherapeutic” drugs. Then, when they complained that their medications were ineffective, you could launch into screeds about “really wanting to get well” and similar “therapeutic” statements.
Interesting. Would it be the sodium in the salt? The iodine(?) if your salt was iodized.
Back in the 1980’s, I read a piece by a Richard Kunin MD, who successfully treated “antipsychotic” induced tardive dyskinesia with manganese salts, and in some cases, relatively high doses of niacin.
Apparently our pharma-employed chemists seem to be unaware that this entire class of drugs is addictive, and this is due to their basic chemical structure. In other (simpler) words- it’s impossible to make a benzo or a sedative that ISN’T addictive.
Well, remember that Gort was in charge. It was Gort’s job to bring the messenger here and to see that Klattu delivered it, even if he had to be brought back from the dead to do so.
Now that the FDA’s been exposed, I expect it to leap into action with attempts to take niacin and vitamin C off the market (“these deadly drugs have been ignored too long!”).
The problem was that you accurately represented your views and they didn’t have any refutations handy, since they probably didn’t prepare for your interview.
I have data strongly suggesting that manganese salts are therapeutic for “antipsychotic” induced dyskinesia. Would they also be useful for “antidepressant” induced dyskinesia as well? Has anyone studied the relationships between trace mineral levels and antidepressant use?
Whoever created that WW1 ad didn’t have much understanding of the grunt mentality- it’s being able to get bombed at intervals that leads the grunts to stay forward without deserting. That guy in the soup bowl helmet need to get buzzed so he won’t be troubled by panics.
Eric, I think the one possibility you might have missed is that our aliens have been engaging in long term observation of our characteristics that has led them to conclude that we’re all savages and/or mental cases, even those of us who seem healthy, which has led them to keep us ignorant of their technology so they don’t have to suffer from deranged crusaders and their racial crusades. After all, they probably don’t look much like “white people ” leading them to suspect they’d be victims of gung ho racism, thereby needing to stay out of sight of the local savages and their endless wars.
You might be able to do both more or less at once. Niacin at the level of 1g TID has a good chance of normalizing your cholesterol and maybe your perceptions as well. It’s likely a bad idea to bring it up with your shrink because he’s likely to go on some screed about you poisoning yourself, although you can tell him if you improve spectacularly.
The drawback to this may be the flushing likely to occur when you start, although there are ways of dealing with this.
Remember niacin, not niacinamide as niacinamide doesn’t lower cholesterol.
No wonder we’re not on the psychotherapists’ A List. We’ve become too jaded because we became platitude-resistant at some point in our lives.
You don’t commit suicide while on B3, either, but you’ll see Hell freeze over before you see a conventional shrink use it at all, much less at therapeutic levels.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Why do I keep thinking about malaria when I read that line? It doesn’t make you any stronger…
In these cases, the variety of the drug isn’t the key. The alleged therapist is attempting to produce a specific kind of experience that might otherwise take years of study in an ashram. Being continuously under the influence of the foreign substance isn’t the idea.
Not as dangerous as you might think. The individuals having the bad effects are more likely to be suffering from distorted perceptions prior to consuming a hallucinogenic substance, one reason Hoffer and Osmond devised their infamous HOD test while they were studying psychedelic therapy for alcoholics. Having given HOD tests to a variety of individuals, I find Hoffer and Osmond convincing on this subject and will usually. mention this to high-scoring individuals interested in hallucinogens.
The real problem with these theories of imbalances is that a number of them don’t primarily effect the brain at all. Another problem is that the psychiatrist frequently doesn’t know squat about real medicine, making it likely that he/she will completely miss the problem. For example, a depressed individual who lacks energy, is sensitive to cold and has trouble with unwanted weight gain unimproved by dieting probably won’t respond to antidepressants at all, because their problem isn’t “psychiatric” depression, but more likely an underactive thyroid.
There are a number of such conditions that can deceive the unwary shrink into mistreating them with psych drugs.
It’s hard to say what the subjects thought about their emperors. They invariably had to go through periods of lulus, like Caligula and Nero. They also had to contend with multiple emperors, all demanding your allegiance simultaneously- your head depended on your ability to schmooze your neighborhood emperor until he was assassinated, while simultaneously being ready to cheer the perpetrator without betraying your “attachment” to his predecessor.
Today, it’s more acceptable to have a tombstone that says how wealthy you were when we all went extinct than to actually exert some kind of effort to keep this from happening. Naturally, robots would make your grave site facilities because there’d be no people around to do it.
A genuinely ghastly performance from modern psychiatry- what sounds like an initial job for non-prescription magnesium chloride, and maybe a few grams of (also non-prescription) niacinamide. But then, there aren’t any winter conferences or gifts for not using prescription drugs.
He isn’t familiar with the concept of addictive allergies to foods, where commonly consumed foods can lead to “addictive behavior” and thoughts, in addition to “psychiatric” symptoms. “Mental health” professionals don’t believe in them because they were described by Theron Randolph, who failed to impress the APA with his accounts of experiences with many of his patients, including a demonstration on stage of addictive/allergic reactions on stage, with several of his patients volunteering, to demonstrate their experiences.
The way you handle cops is to give them too much to do. Tails can be led many places, because they have to know what you’re doing. Maybe they’d like to spend the day at the mall, going into every store. Maybe they’d like a leisurely lunch at your favorite buffet as you go repeatedly back and forth from the food line. Talk quietly to many strangers, asking them innocent questions in a low voice, nodding significantly while glancing “suspiciously” around if they say anything in reply. If you smoke, ask your tail for lights. Drive aimlessly, while stopping at many places. Be sure to talk to strangers on the sidewalk while driving, making many stops at different places afterwards. Let them have a busy day, full of minor activities they can report. Always maintain a sunny disposition as you can, particularly if you have to talk to them.
Psychiatrists don’t necessarily do well at identifying biological ailments that produce “psychiatric” signs. I remember from many years ago when a patient’s hair turned green while he was a “psychiatric” patient in a state institution. He’d been in there for years, yet nobody noticed he had Wilson’s Disease until the excess copper in his hair oxidized, revealing his condition at last.
The reasoning behind these notions is pretty sad, as psychiatric “diagnoses” are just behavioral descriptions that tell you nothing about their causes.
“Mauve Factor” is a good example. Psychiatrists don’t believe it has any validity because it shows up in a variety of “diagnostic” categories, even though the symptomology of these patients is constant, no matter what “diagnostic” groups they’re placed into (and all will respond to treatment with mega B6 and zinc, no matter what “diagnostic” group they’re place into).
Is it slowly sinking into shrink awareness that the DSM’s aren’t good for diagnosing anything, much less something that pertains to actual actual successful treatments? It seems to be taking quite a while.
The question is whether these cognitive deficits were around before or after cannabis use. Sometimes recreational drugs are consumed to make a miserable experience less so. Such individuals will seldom to never stop using them if their mental functioning isn’t simultaneously improved.
Well, if you’re still on the antidepressant, I’d suggest using megascorbate (a la Linus Pauling) instead of OTC cold “remedies” if you get another upper respiratory virus.
I wonder if this whole miserable scene was initiated by double anticholinergics, (1) the Prozac, and (2) the cold medicine, which doubtlessly contained at least one antihistamine.
You’ve got to realize that, in the United States, psychiatry tends to be the specialty choice for those with the worst grades in their med school classes.
That you could make numerous off the cuff remarks about depression demonstrates that someone’s thinking about a disease, rather than a syndrome with numerous possible origins. Dr. Pies shows no evidence of realizing this, when he makes these sight-unseen diagnoses after saying they’re not possible.
The East Asian martial arts were created by Buddhist monks. You don’t want any old sap to be carrying several ounces of gold, that you need to give your Buddha sculpture a skin, to your monastery deep in the mountains.
How are you going to discover the genetic roots of the standard psychiatric “diagnoses” when they aren’t diagnoses at all, but behavioral descriptions? If I can find multiple causes for each of these supposed diagnoses, how is simple genetic testing going to reach any understanding of the “diagnoses” themselves?
I doubt if these concepts will induce me to stop taking B3 every day.
Hoffer also had had LSD. I believe I found out from a piece in The Hallucinogens, a very rare out-of-print volume he and Osmond wrote in 1967 (that devoted 120 pages to LSD).
The book is hard to find. If the other owners are like me, they’re more likely to shoot you rather than lend their copies out.
It’s no surprise that psychiatric diagnosticians haven’t made any progress with severe “mental” illnesses. Their “diagnostic” categories are invariably inhabitants of the diagnostic wastebasket, where syndromes are real, but their “diagnoses” aren’t.
I don’t know about oppression inducing suicides, but I do know that incompetent prescribing does. Most shrinks don’t inquire about unusual perceptual events when diagnosing depressed patients, so they miss depressed individuals who are simultaneously experiencing a number of perceptual distortions, mistakenly prescribing antidepressants for them and making the distorted perceptions worse.
Hoffer and Osmond had interesting backgrounds. Hoffer wasn’t a psychiatrist at all. When the province of Saskatchewan offered him his first psych job as Director of Psychiatric research for the province, they sent him to various psychiatric schools and facilities to give him a grasp of 1950’s psychiatry. Late in his career he developed vitamin programs for cancer patients.
Osmond spent World War II as a ship’s surgeon on convoy escorts, after (foolishly?) asking the Admiralty for a shrink’s job on board one of the larger naval units. When he went to Canada, he became superintendent of Weyburn Hospital (at the time, one of the world’s worst mental institutions), doing novel things like converting the hospital’s seclusion rooms into refuges for those with sensory overloads (I know some of the contributors might be shocked to hear that there were patients who had to be talked out of hanging out in them instead of fighting not to be put into them).
Both of them had used hallucinogens of various kinds (Osmond took peyote while participating in a native ceremony). Both were involved in psychedelic therapy for alcoholism, which became routine in the province until the US DEA put pressure on the province’s government to cease and desist from giving patients LSD.
When they saw your sheet, they “knew” you were into some kind of mischief because they saw that “psych” label on your sheet. They’re guys I wouldn’t care to have around- to act that way, particularly if they expressed psychiatric smugness, would make me a candidate for jail, and the interrogator a candidate for a sudden outbreak of Fist-to-Nose disease.
Were I a therapist of some kind, I’d want to know about the nature of the panics, plus the nature of the individual’s experiential world. Although the money might be better in prolonged psychotherapy, I’d be embarrassed beyond comprehension if I found out my client actually suffered from some kind of magnesium deficiency or a mental state responsive to megavitamin and/or mineral supplements.
Few have subscribed to the notion that delusions are attempts to understand the meaning of altered perceptions and that you might have the same or similar delusions were your perceptions altered in the same way. This is why you need to understand people’s experiential worlds before you pontificate about their “delusions”.
Well, these guys are better off than the Schizophrenics Anonymous chapters, which only lasted if the members took their megavitamins regularly.
You’ve got to remember that Hoffer’s case load was filled with other people’s treatment failures who were referred to him for that very reason. They were the folks likely to wind up on antipsychotics for some time, unless he could pull them free of them.
Well, Steve, depression is a proud resident of the diagnostic wastebasket, while a multitude of physical and psychic causes haunt the landscape of low moods. Some of them, like copper intoxication, or lead poisoning, wouldn’t even rate a psychiatric diagnosis (a good thing, as general medicine has treatments for such ailments).
Well, Steve, depression is a proud resident of the diagnostic wastebasket, while a multitude of physical and psychic causes haunt the landscape of low moods. Some of them, like copper intoxication, or lead poisoning, wouldn’t even rate a psychiatric diagnosis (a good thing, as general medicine has treatments for such ailments). (Duplicate)
Well, it was a wonder drug all right. You’re probably still wondering why they prescribed it in the first place.
Why do psychiatrists repeatedly use drugs that are bad for patients? Because the salesman who visits the psych’s office tells them it’s OK, that’s why. If the shrink is one of those guys who got into psychiatry because the pharmacology classes were too tough, he’ll willingly agree to whatever the company rep (who never even studied pharmacology) tells him.
Yes, he got the idea from Richard Kunin.
One reason I sometimes think of myself as a secret agent instead of a psychiatric consumer. And my mission is to disrupt psychiatry by providing cheap alternatives to allegedly therapeutic drugs (shh).
Another problem comes from not properly examining the “depressed”, which is where the examiner fails to look deeper into a patient’s depressed state and prescribes the wrong medication, a serious problem if the “depressed” patient actually has distorted perceptions. Such individuals can be turned from “depressed” to floridly psychotic by antidepressant therapy, leaving the shrink to devise bizarre explanations for this outcome (and cover up his/her negligence).
The big headache with present-day “neuro-biological” psychiatry is that almost all experimental work in this field is done as attempts to sell drugs that the sponsoring company is trying to get (or keep) on the market. Conditions that lend themselves to drugless treatments are ignored or belittled in the attempts to get that patent that will generate the Big Bucks for the company and its stock.
Yes, but remember that calling him your therapy dog gets him into the restaurant.
They’re probably hoping that the government will pay. Psych patients on drugs aren’t exactly at the top of the income ladder.
It was actually 44 years ago, in an article by Kunin in the old Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry (now the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine).
In a comment on a previous article on the subject, I mentioned seeing an article about manganese 30 or so years ago. I was wrong- the piece was in a 1976 Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry (or Medicine as it had a name change). If you want to see it, it’s on archive at the Orthomolecular.org site, which allows you to see back issues. You can look up tardive dyskinesia as a subject, Richard Kunin’s works as an author.
So harsh on psychiatry? Don’t you know that BPD’s a proud inhabitant of the diagnostic wastebasket?
Another thing big-time mental health frequently dismiss is that “mental illnesses” can be caused or aggravated by physical things going on outside the brain. Diet-related conditions are the most obvious- the mental changes occurring during pellagra, beriberi and scurvy are well known, but not apparently by psychiatrists. Malfunctioning thyroids can produce ailments that resemble “psychiatric” conditions, including catatonia and mania, depending on just how active one’s thyroid is- I wonder how many of MIA “user” readers were asked about glandular function if they were diagnosed manic or catatonic.
Learn to collect them yourself, if you have access to pastures. The easily recognizable P. Cubensis only grows in the South, so you’ll have to know your varieties if you’re going to wander northern pastures, where such mushrooms are smaller and less likely to stain blue, the most striking feature of P. Cubensis.
No, but it might help to have some 500mg. or 1 gram niacin tablets around the house. Remember, you’re likely to break out in flushing with them unless you take your B3 everyday, although that wouldn’t be a problem with niacinamide, which seldom induces flushing.
Washington state, I believe. Actually, it was foolish to try to outlaw hallucinogenic mushrooms in Washington state in the first place, because there were so many common varieties, some of which grew on lawns and in grassy parks. You would have to dig up and/or apply fungicide to every lawn in the state.
I should be deliriously excited about this new and doubtlessly expensive drug, but I came across an article by a Richard Kunin, MD 30 years or so ago about the use of manganese salts (and sometimes niacin) for this very purpose. This can’t be valuable, because members of the orthomolecular community quickly took it up. Besides, it’s cheap, so it defies mainline psychopharmacology, which only seeks to develop drugs more expensive than their predecessors to create their therapeutic breakthroughs.
No, psychiatry, itself, is stranded in Jurassic World.
But there are benefits in prescribing antidepressants! These are the profits coming to pharma and opinion leaders, measurable in dollars and cents. The patients are expendable- they are crazy, after all.
Well put, Ekaterina.
And all of big-time psychiatry was aghast at the thought of using megavitamins B3 and C for schizophrenias instead of the alleged wonder phenothiazines (the vitamins might be dangerous!), because they didn’t change you from florid psychosis to zombie overnight.
They don’t think so much about the right to kill you, than the need to “super-medicate” you, using doses as high as they think plausible, raising them if you complain (surely a sign of impending relapse to an ineffectual initial dose). Maybe they also think that dying is a deliberate self attempt to foil your own recovery at their expense.
Interestingly enough, Bill Wilson, himself, wanted go beyond AA meetings as tools for sobriety, and began to correspond with the Saskatchewan group headed by Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, who were studying psychedelic therapy in the treatment of alcoholism and the use of megadose niacin in the suppression of the DT’s. Bill had already taken it once in hospital surroundings, and, I believe, had Osmond turn him on at his home. After he found out that niacin stabilized his moods, he became a great advocate for it (he’d persuaded 30 of his AA buddies to try it to get their opinion), and for several years just before his death, had a foldout on it inserted into copies of the Big Book being sent out.
Well, if you delivered proper services as a peer, you’d find yourself out on the street, accused of blasphemy, or even worse, sorcery, if your proper services got your charges to improve but didn’t use standard psychiatric methods that your employers approved of.
How could you expect antidepressants to work consistently if you know that “depression” is only a syndrome- a collection of signs and symptoms that could be the result of one or more of a number of conditions with different causes with differing proper treatments? Some of these conditions are even made worse by antidepressants, which will lead the “average” shrinks to look for plausible excuses to exonerate themselves from blame for prescribing a faulty treatment that led their depressed patients to become floridly psychotic.
I notice that these studies make no attempt to find out what’s inducing “ADHD”. In particular, they’re paying no attention to lead intoxication, which closely mimics this aforementioned condition. But that takes work, such as sending hair and serum samples to a laboratory- better to pile on the stimulants, paying no attention to unpleasant thoughts that all your medicating might be in vain. Better to rely on chestnuts like the patient staying hyperactive because (s)he doesn’t want to get well.
The doctors were suffering from terminal Mental Health Mind when they gave him olanzapine, which they did because he didn’t want them to. Terminal Mental Health Mind kicked in, in which the staff believed the kid was refusing meds because they were benefitting him in some mysterious way, so he was retreating from sanity as part of a Flight into Illness. His very reluctance was the very reason these brilliant professionals had to medicate him with that very same drug.
Well, they do if they take their vitamins and avoid stimulants, sucrose and allergy inducing foods, while tapering off any psych meds they might be on.
If you’re talking about stimulant withdrawal, the method is to use multi-gram doses of vitamin C to antagonize the jumpers, plus large amounts of vitamin B1 to counteract the “need for speed” that may cause relapses. I could supervise this, myself, if I had to (I’ve overseen much more dangerous home alcohol withdrawals), but your best bet would be a naturopathic or an orthomolecular practitioner.
The “psycho-medical” model you describe is on its last legs, but studying the biological conditions that lead to “psychiatric diagnoses” is likely just beginning. This means that your future “psychiatrist” will need to have a extensive knowledge of psychiatric trivia to be able to grasp a proper diagnosis and treatment for his patients’ mental state (no more immediately treating fat people extremely sensitive to cold with SSRI’s- or any other antidepressant, for that matter).
Borderline Personality Disorder is a proud occupant of the diagnostic wastebasket. This article helps to demonstrate why, and also why it will remain there.
The docility of a bowl of custard.
One of my favorites concerning diagnostic testing was a commentary about a urine test for B6 zinc dependency. The critic was dismissive because a variety of “diagnostic” categories responded to the same deficiency. The thought that the alleged diagnostic categories might not be reliable, instead, completely eluded him, even though the symptomology was similar among all the “categories”, and the successful treatment was constant.
Well, The present approach toward mental illnesses today is that they aren’t, frequently coming from a variety of physical causes. The alleged diagnostic categories are just descriptions of certain mental states that say nothing about how they should be treated. It’s no surprise there are no certain diagnostic tests.
This should be no surprise as antipsychotics induce brain damage in their subjects- brain damage, which increases the longer that antipsychotics are used.
I take it that the idea of having the psychologists suggest nutrients they might use for symptomatic relief is far too revolutionary for the esteemed medicos to even think about.
I can think of nutrient treatments for drug-related dysfunctions, such as niacin and/or glutamine for alcoholism and vitamins C and B1 for stimulant related dysfunctions but this “drugs for the dopers” stuff has me baffled, particularly in the cases of pharmaceutical treatments for pharmaceutical addictions.
I’m not impressed. Since the “diagnostic categories” aren’t real, it’s likely that the “treatments” will be equally fantastic.
Well, there have been advances in treatment for negative medical states, but Big Time Psychiatry has fought like tigers to make them go away as they don’t rely on ever more exotic drugs and zapping patients into even more violent seizure states. The companies are just as outraged because you can buy some of these items off the shelf for a fraction of the cost of exotic “curative” drugs. Just say “megavitamins” to your neighborhood shrink and see what happens if you don’t believe the above paragraph.
Sorry to have become such a menace to society, since I haven’t had a psych drug for 35+ years.
You can get supplemental manganese in health food stores, apparently usually sold in 10mg. tablets. Were I obliged to oversee a trial, I’d start with 10mg./day for a week, then 20mg. for a week or two, then 30mg./day. I’d stop if the movements got worse, as excess manganese can produce extrapyramidal symptoms.
I noticed that your crusaders didn’t go after the orthomolecular guys with the same vigor when they went after you. Of course, the orthomolecular types are more interested in real medicine than “psychiatric medicine” and use physical testing such as trace mineral analysis as diagnostic aids. Their patients frequently don’t have a psychiatric status, but will be diagnosed with physical ailments.
They’re some of the greater menaces to Big Time Psychiatry in recent decades and will become more so, as “psychiatric” diseases disappear to be replaced by garden variety physical ones.
Her serum copper’s likely to be high in these circumstances, leading to a depressed mood that probably can’t be successfully treated with antipsychotics, ECT, etc., although zinc and B6 will likely be therapeutic (which the shrinks will ignore as they “know” vitamins and minerals have nothing to do with your mental functioning).
Well, that’s no surprise. That’s the pharmaceutical drug business in action.
If you wanted to be catty, you might ask the therapist if (s)he found Bartlett’s Big Book of Familiar Quotations a profound source of therapeutic guidance.
It would seem preposterous to claim that any disease caused by microorganisms could be blocked by stimulant consumption, which exhausts individuals physically and chemically (immune and recovery response stuff).
That would be a good idea, but I thought we were commemorating a guy singularly short of good ideas.
They don’t help patients, but they can do wonders for pharmaceutical companies’ bank accounts and subsequent stock prices.
No, they aren’t “mental illnesses”, but understanding their chemistry and proper nutrient therapy can provide a useful means of dealing with them, particularly since they’re considered incurable, like “schizophrenia” and “depression” still are.
Maybe we should turn the anniversary of his death into National Zombie Day, during which people with unused medications around the house should take big enough doses to spend the day as zombies in memory of this great man and his therapeutic ambitions.
Maybe he actually died of disappointment because we’re not semiconscious and sleeping 15-16 hours a day. What geeks we are!
Gotta remember boans, that I’m one of those weirdos who takes his niacin every day and avoids shrinks like the plague, knowing that they’d see vitamin consumption as the sign of serious pending delirium. I also read Forbidden Literature, in which “mental” illnesses don’t exist except as indicators for unusual physically based conditions- in fact, the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry changed its name to the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine a few years back- it’s third name change since it first appeared 60 or so years ago, I believe, and now devotes much of its space to such illnesses as HIV and ebola.
It might be interesting to note that Stanislas Grof was (and maybe is) the only individual who had permission to dispense LSD in both Western and East bloc nations during the Cold War.
Oh, there’s room for biomedical models, all right, but not for psychiatric pseudo diseases like “schizophrenia”‘ “depression” and such, but for directly identifying underlying physical causes for the states that are thus “diagnosed” in psych terms, such as lead poisoning for hyperactivity and mania wherein the symptoms lead to the identification of the cause and correct treatment.
Historic, most likely. Sounds like a relic of the days when prescriptions were written in Latin, so patients wouldn’t know squat about the drugs they were getting.
“Concentrating on the meds” would not only be likely to separate you from others, but from yourself, as well. That’s one of the things akathisia’s all about.
He picked it up from R. Kunin, MD, featuring this treatment in an edition of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, which he edited at the time.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that paranoid notions in individuals arise as an attempt to explain why unusual perceptual experiences are going on- the beliefs would be rational if the perceptions were real, but, alas, they aren’t. This is most obvious in chronic stimulant consumption, notorious for inducing paranoid notions quickly.
It would be better if you could get these individuals to adopt magnesium deficient diets, so they could experience panic disorder firsthand, while simultaneously treating it ineptly with their own “chemotherapeutic” drugs. Then, when they complained that their medications were ineffective, you could launch into screeds about “really wanting to get well” and similar “therapeutic” statements.
Interesting. Would it be the sodium in the salt? The iodine(?) if your salt was iodized.
Back in the 1980’s, I read a piece by a Richard Kunin MD, who successfully treated “antipsychotic” induced tardive dyskinesia with manganese salts, and in some cases, relatively high doses of niacin.
Apparently our pharma-employed chemists seem to be unaware that this entire class of drugs is addictive, and this is due to their basic chemical structure. In other (simpler) words- it’s impossible to make a benzo or a sedative that ISN’T addictive.
Well, remember that Gort was in charge. It was Gort’s job to bring the messenger here and to see that Klattu delivered it, even if he had to be brought back from the dead to do so.
Now that the FDA’s been exposed, I expect it to leap into action with attempts to take niacin and vitamin C off the market (“these deadly drugs have been ignored too long!”).
The problem was that you accurately represented your views and they didn’t have any refutations handy, since they probably didn’t prepare for your interview.
I have data strongly suggesting that manganese salts are therapeutic for “antipsychotic” induced dyskinesia. Would they also be useful for “antidepressant” induced dyskinesia as well? Has anyone studied the relationships between trace mineral levels and antidepressant use?
Whoever created that WW1 ad didn’t have much understanding of the grunt mentality- it’s being able to get bombed at intervals that leads the grunts to stay forward without deserting. That guy in the soup bowl helmet need to get buzzed so he won’t be troubled by panics.
Eric, I think the one possibility you might have missed is that our aliens have been engaging in long term observation of our characteristics that has led them to conclude that we’re all savages and/or mental cases, even those of us who seem healthy, which has led them to keep us ignorant of their technology so they don’t have to suffer from deranged crusaders and their racial crusades. After all, they probably don’t look much like “white people ” leading them to suspect they’d be victims of gung ho racism, thereby needing to stay out of sight of the local savages and their endless wars.
You might be able to do both more or less at once. Niacin at the level of 1g TID has a good chance of normalizing your cholesterol and maybe your perceptions as well. It’s likely a bad idea to bring it up with your shrink because he’s likely to go on some screed about you poisoning yourself, although you can tell him if you improve spectacularly.
The drawback to this may be the flushing likely to occur when you start, although there are ways of dealing with this.
Remember niacin, not niacinamide as niacinamide doesn’t lower cholesterol.
No wonder we’re not on the psychotherapists’ A List. We’ve become too jaded because we became platitude-resistant at some point in our lives.
You don’t commit suicide while on B3, either, but you’ll see Hell freeze over before you see a conventional shrink use it at all, much less at therapeutic levels.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Why do I keep thinking about malaria when I read that line? It doesn’t make you any stronger…
In these cases, the variety of the drug isn’t the key. The alleged therapist is attempting to produce a specific kind of experience that might otherwise take years of study in an ashram. Being continuously under the influence of the foreign substance isn’t the idea.
Not as dangerous as you might think. The individuals having the bad effects are more likely to be suffering from distorted perceptions prior to consuming a hallucinogenic substance, one reason Hoffer and Osmond devised their infamous HOD test while they were studying psychedelic therapy for alcoholics. Having given HOD tests to a variety of individuals, I find Hoffer and Osmond convincing on this subject and will usually. mention this to high-scoring individuals interested in hallucinogens.
The real problem with these theories of imbalances is that a number of them don’t primarily effect the brain at all. Another problem is that the psychiatrist frequently doesn’t know squat about real medicine, making it likely that he/she will completely miss the problem. For example, a depressed individual who lacks energy, is sensitive to cold and has trouble with unwanted weight gain unimproved by dieting probably won’t respond to antidepressants at all, because their problem isn’t “psychiatric” depression, but more likely an underactive thyroid.
There are a number of such conditions that can deceive the unwary shrink into mistreating them with psych drugs.
It’s hard to say what the subjects thought about their emperors. They invariably had to go through periods of lulus, like Caligula and Nero. They also had to contend with multiple emperors, all demanding your allegiance simultaneously- your head depended on your ability to schmooze your neighborhood emperor until he was assassinated, while simultaneously being ready to cheer the perpetrator without betraying your “attachment” to his predecessor.
Today, it’s more acceptable to have a tombstone that says how wealthy you were when we all went extinct than to actually exert some kind of effort to keep this from happening. Naturally, robots would make your grave site facilities because there’d be no people around to do it.
A genuinely ghastly performance from modern psychiatry- what sounds like an initial job for non-prescription magnesium chloride, and maybe a few grams of (also non-prescription) niacinamide. But then, there aren’t any winter conferences or gifts for not using prescription drugs.
He isn’t familiar with the concept of addictive allergies to foods, where commonly consumed foods can lead to “addictive behavior” and thoughts, in addition to “psychiatric” symptoms. “Mental health” professionals don’t believe in them because they were described by Theron Randolph, who failed to impress the APA with his accounts of experiences with many of his patients, including a demonstration on stage of addictive/allergic reactions on stage, with several of his patients volunteering, to demonstrate their experiences.
The way you handle cops is to give them too much to do. Tails can be led many places, because they have to know what you’re doing. Maybe they’d like to spend the day at the mall, going into every store. Maybe they’d like a leisurely lunch at your favorite buffet as you go repeatedly back and forth from the food line. Talk quietly to many strangers, asking them innocent questions in a low voice, nodding significantly while glancing “suspiciously” around if they say anything in reply. If you smoke, ask your tail for lights. Drive aimlessly, while stopping at many places. Be sure to talk to strangers on the sidewalk while driving, making many stops at different places afterwards. Let them have a busy day, full of minor activities they can report. Always maintain a sunny disposition as you can, particularly if you have to talk to them.