Well, the industry must do all it can to prevent pregnant women from taking B6 and zinc in the final trimester of pregnancy in order to sell expensive high-tech treatments that won’t work, as elevated serum copper seems to be the real reason for these “depressions”.
Ah, but if you recover from psychotic illnesses using unusual means- real medicine, nutrients, dietary avoidance, treating allergies, support groups like SA, etc., then Big Time Psychiatry will rise with righteous fury to tell the world how you’ve let yourself be deceived by scoundrels and are destined to finish your life drooling in the back wards of some institution.
The big hassle here is that “depression” is misinterpreted as a disease unto itself instead of a syndrome likely to have differing causes, which is why you have individuals carelessly labeled as suffering from a disease called depression, when such isn’t the case. This is also why you have patients with this “disease” losing their marbles when (erroneously) prescribed antidepressants.
The problem is that the alleged medical model of psychiatry isn’t medical at all, but a pseudo-medical model, as the alleged diseases are merely behavioral descriptions, rather than diseases unto themselves.
It seems to be a state secret that niacin can be used to remove the dangers associated with alcohol withdrawal, while as niacinamide, it can serve in aiding withdrawal from benzos. Of course, little money can be made by Big Pharma (or Big Hospitalization) as the withdrawal process is speeded up and your “medication” isn’t patented and thus isn’t lucrative.
I’ve overseen (home) alcohols before, but I haven’t supervised a benzo withdrawal, although I’ve read articles by the orthomolecular guys that suggests that they have done so.
Well, Steve, treatments that do work are likely to be frowned upon by our “professional” classes as forms of black magic, or maybe hypnotism, that are likely to direct youthful patients into subversive antisocial activities instead of leaving them bland vegetables.
Why are things like low magnesium, low zinc and unstable blood sugar coming to mind? Why am I thinking about niacinamide? Why am I curious about perceptual instability? I’m supposed to radiate reassurance and puff the skills of shrinks.
The problem to the question you’re asking, is that the answer is, “it depends.” It depends on user perceptual status, the kind of substances most commonly used as well as or in addition to cannabis, the presence and kind of users’ physical and social peculiarities, and so on.
Poor babies- actually having to do something positive for their patients in order to get paid for it.
This article illustrates the difference between real medicine and the pseudo-medical model that Big-Time Psychiatry considers medical (as well as demonstrating why I don’t have anything to do with most shrinks). It’s their own heads that have shrunk.
“Borderline Personality Disorder,” eh? You just got tossed into the Diagnostic Wastebasket, so the shrink wouldn’t have to face his own ineptitude, demonstrated by the ineffective series of ECT you just had.
I know, Steve, but remember, if I have to do psychiatric things, it’s as a kind of psychiatric mechanic seeing other people’s (professionals, actually) treatment failures, which is why I don’t do them very often because I can get in trouble, even if I’m “brilliantly” successful (for example, I lost a job at a residential treatment center for substance abusers when two guys “graduated” who weren’t supposed to, shocking the professional staff- I was so peeved, I never told the staff people I’d simply put them on niacinamide, which I could administer when the professionals had gone for the evening).
I’m glad I’m not spending any money for this certain-to-fail initiative. Depression, as the shrinks call it, isn’t an illness unto itself, but a syndrome (particular group of signs and symptoms) that can have any number of causes. I’m just a chump without formal psychiatric training, but I can think of several (thyroid, vitamin dependencies and deficiencies, heavy metal poisoning, hypoglycemia, cerebral allergies) that quickly come to mind while I’m sitting here typing. Notice that none of my examples can be readily treated with antidepressants or SSRI’s.
Think psychiatry doesn’t critically vet treatments? Follow psychiatry’s fight against the clinical use of vitamin B3 in psychiatric treatments, which seems to have taken on the nature of a crusade- ditch that dangerous vitamin and other equally dangerous substances like vitamin C for safe antipsychotic drugs (I’m sure all those patients with drug-induced dyskinesias will want to jump on this bandwagon and join the crusade, particularly when they discover manganese salts in competent hands can relieve this condition).
Time management problems? Take up tournament chess. The clock will show you how to manage time.
That was well put, Steve. I think the idea of the mind as a product of the brain and is dependent on its effective functioning is a little too deep for our present shrinks.
“Personality disorders” just reeks of the diagnostic wastebasket approach to psychiatric matters…”you don’t know what’s going on? Just dump the whole thing into this diagnostic wastebasket here”.
I find it unusual that shrinks would use a CNS depressant (anesthetic) in “antidepressant therapy”. It would seem that you’d have to ignore physiology to be a successful shrink, although you might be able to suppress suicidal ideation by leaving the patient so anesthetized that he/she would be incapable of any ideation.
Where do these places get their “alleged” doctors? Do they come from the Frankenstein Medical Institute? Many, if not most psych drugs have antihistaminic properties, so Bridgewater’s psychiatric “disciplinarians” are doing the equivalent of giving their patients downers and alcohol simultaneously. This will eventually come out of the woodwork when a patient dies or flips out (simultaneously thrashing the security staff in the process with the super strength they inadvertently gave him/her) or both.
When I read these articles, I have some difficulty with the psychotherapy stories about treating “mental” illnesses properly, as psychiatric “diagnoses” are just descriptions of syndromes that can have a number of possible origins that don’t all have the same treatment. There’s no “one size fits all” for the proper treatment of “mental” syndromes.
I’m a bit surprised they’re still being prescribed in such quantities. It was only 50+ years ago I first heard they were addictive and that withdrawing from them was worse than coming off heroin.
Maybe so, but if their institutional attitudes are frozen, they’re goners, like the French in 1940, when the Germans came.
These fumbling treatments for depression exist because it was believed that depression was an entity unto itself, rather than a sign that something was amiss with the sufferer that indicated further inquiry and/or examination was necessary.
Think of psychiatry as an army under siege. After only minimal gains, it has now been driven back to its starting point and feels itself in danger of total collapse, should it lose further intellectual territory.
These studies also don’t presume “Major Depressive Disorder” to be the wastebasket diagnosis it actually is, so they unknowingly have heterogeneous groups of patients. It would be truly remarkable if they did find some Universal Clinical Truth through such diagnostic “methods”.
I hate to quibble, but these drugs like ketamine, esketamine, etc. aren’t psychedelic drugs, but more closely related to anesthetics, illustrating the folly of using psych drugs on the delerious, thanks to these drugs, while under the illusion they’re tripping out, instead. (I hope I don’t sound too confusing)
This reminds me of the hubbub around PCP, aka phencyclidine, a similarly acting drug used as an animal anesthetic around 50 years ago- same properties, same tendency for inducing delerium in subjects, particularly after efforts using antipsychotics to “tranquilize” them when they were bumming out.
In the late 1950’s, H&O began to consider sobering experiences. They’d also gone to a peyote ceremony in Alberta at the invitation of the Blackfeet, who were trying to make their religious peyote ceremonies respectable to white governments. Shortly after this, they created a study using acid to simulate DT’s. While doing this, they discovered that the guys who had the psychedelic experiences instead of the “psychotomimetic” were the most likely to stay sober. From there, they became involved with psychedelic therapy in alcoholics, and devised protocols for proper usage to maximize good results. The government of Saskatchewan was so impressed, it authorized and began to use psychedelic therapy as a first line treatment for alcoholism throughout the province. The Americasn DEA was outraged and forced the province to discontinue psychedelic therapy for their alcoholic patients. (your government hard at work to protect youy from imaginary threats)
Well, the Native American Church uses them (well, peyote, at least) in ways beneficial to the members, as did the Province of Saskatchewan, until the US DEA clamped down on it for providing psychedelic experiences to alcoholics to help sober them up, when the Agency “knew” that this was “impossible”.
At the risk of getting electronically silenced, I’d suggest paying more attention to the work of Hoffer and Osmond, particularly their magnum opus- The Hallucinogens. Although long out of print, you may still find copies in university and college libraries (I’d have to shoot you if you tried to take my copy).
One of the problems I have with commenting is a result of having familiarity with orthomolecular medicine for 45+ years. Something that is old hat for me, such as nutrient therapy for schizophrenia syndromes, is bizarre and strange for readers who have psychosocial beliefs about the syndromes’ origins, so I’ll inadvertently write things that get my correspondence sent to the electronic wasteland instead of getting posted on the site.
Yes, your schizophrenia was indeed right when it told you esketamine was bad for you. Unfortunately, your schizophrenia couldn’t tell you about ketamine antagonists and the anesthesiologist didn’t know anything about the subject, which I can’t reveal if I want a comment to actually get printed.
Like most mental “diseases”, ADHD is a description and not an idenntity unto itself. Also, like many other of these “diseases”, the behaviors that give it its name are also likely to have a variety of origins and likely to have a variety of proper treatments, once you determine the specific identity of the condition you’re dealing with.
One of the common headaches about psychiatric “diagnosis” is that the shrinks pay little attention to your experiential world, thereby knowing little to nothing about your real mental status, raising the likelihood you’ll be ineptly or improperly treated by the shrink’s medication efforts.
Using selected nutrients instead of psych drugs and having done so for years, I find these arguments fairly bizarre, particularly since there’s no real improvement in the treatment groups, although there is a great deal of company puffery about their newest drugs after the alleged studies are done.
Lead is also responsible for inducing hyperactivity in children, which leads me to wonder why this isn’t routinely checked for prior to prescribing ritalin and other stimulants. Speed isn’t going to do you much good if you’re lead crazed, although the doctor can now believe you’re a disordered personality, to absolve himself/herself from guilt by bungling.
If I wanted psychedelic therapy, I’d go to see Maria Sabrina, but she must be gone by now, as she was old when the Wassons saw her back in the 1950’s.
I’m looking forward to seeing the DEA discover that there are hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms that grow wild in every state in the Union- the perpetual drone of helicopters over cattle country seeking manured fields, squads of “heroes” tramping through swamps as they seek the dreaded calamus, helicopters seeking infestations of jimsonweed to spray with herbicide- sights and sites worth seeing and mentioning.
What happens if you know more about psychedelics and hallucinogens than the doctor does?
Duplicate comment.
I wonder how much attention this army of counselers is paying to their students’/clients’ diets. I remember my school days and how I attempted to subsist on sorry school and snack food with lots of added sucrose and caffeine, plus alcohol on weekends. No wonder I was so miserable much of the time.
At least part of this is due to “schizophrenia” not being a single disease entity, so that these studies are attempts to find single “causes” for the existence of a polyglot entity. There should be no surprised all these sub-entities have confused seekers looking for for a single one.
This reminds me of a gentleman some friends of mine picked up while he was hitchhiking. He was a gay gent who happened to have a black belt in taekwando. When he was in a nasty mood, he’d go to a trashy bar in the heart of his hometown, where if he heard patrons badmouthing homosexuals, he’d flame on, and when the badmouthing patrons became irritated, he’d suddenly pay for his drink and leave, right after they’d ordered, which would give him time to get a head start on them.
When they came out, they’d see him dart down a nearby alley he’d previously scouted. If they followed, it meant they were actually headed for the local hospital’s emergency room as new patients, instead of heading for giving this queer the beating they thought he deserved.
Am I correct in suspecting that no effort was made to identify the origins of these suspected depressions? Depressed mood can arrive from numerous origins that naturally have numerous proper treatments- am I thinking of them because I’m a psychiatric mechanic and not a shrink or social worker?
You were likely high in serum copper and low in zinc, a common feature at the end of pregnancies. Psychiatrists aren’t going to tell you this because you’re chances of making them money will become limited, at best, should it be true. Zinc, B6, C and B-complex aren’t going to finance those MD vacation trips by themselves.
As a known practitioner of Crtimethink, I’m obliged to agree with you here, Steve.
It’s probably best to start with a hair sample to see what your manganese levels actually are, because you want to start with larger amounts, which you’ll then decrease when your symptomology does, as excess manganese can cause the same symptoms as the drug- induced dyskinesias- best to see if there’s an orthomolecular practitioner in your neighborhood who knows what they’re doing.
You wouldn’t want doctors treating TD with manganese, now, would you? It works when properly used but doesn’t provide the big bucks for manufacturers that having a patented drug does.
Looks like people seeking the “psychedelic experience” should devote their “pre-tripping” time to scaring up a copy of *The Hallucinogens*, by Hoffer and Osmond, which discusses psychedelic therapy in some detail, including contraindications for the use of these drugs. The book is now quite rare, as it was too pedestrian for both enthusiasts and enemies of psychedelic use.
The Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) test is still around, fortunately. If you have an orthomolecular therapist in town, he/she may have one, if you don’t know a weirdo like me, who also has one. (It was a screening instrument used to screen Canadian alcoholics in H&O’s tests of psychedelic therapy).
Well, if you were going to walk around in a cast 24 hours a day, it would seem that the likelihood you’d break the leg not in a cast would rise, particularly if you had to use stairs, as the cast would give you difficulties balancing while going up or down.
That’s what they’re called, but they hardly were. Unusual, yes- MD was Hoffer’s second doctorate, while Osmond spent the years that would have been a psychiatric residency as a ship’s surgeon crossing and recrossing the Atlantic on the convoys.
What is also missed is that Hoffer never had psychiatric training and that basic megavitamin therapy also used vitamin C, as well as B3.
I bet that Timothy Leary never went to a Peyote Ceremony, like old Humphry did, back in the 1950’s.
You just have to realize who’s considering someone else crazy and why.
The word was supposed to be “properly”- sorry about that.
Did any of these acolytes study the work of Hoffer and Osmond, who ran an LSD based program for alcoholics in Saskatchewan back in the 1960’s?
It appears not, as the acolytes still don’t know how to screen their patients perioerly, a process that eventually took the Canadians less than an hour, and which I’ve learned to do by myself. I even have an HOD test, which I’ve used for that purpose.
The Personality Disorder- a proud inhabitant of the Diagnostic Wastebasket. Need we say more?
The interesting thing about this as that wild psychedelics live in practically every state and in probably especially in most states where cattle owners pasture their herds.
I’d prefer New Jersey’s Earth House, if it’s still around. It places as much interest in your biophysical environment as the Soteria Houses do in your psychosocial environment, but not with filling you with the latest pharmaceuticals (or the older ones, for that matter.
This should come as no surprise. These skewed groups of “undesirables” are the usual subjects for drug toxicity tests, which they’ve been for decades (if not for centuries?). That they’re used for testing hallucinogens is just par for the course, even though they make poor subjects for testing these substances as our “powers that be” knew nothing about the contraindications for hallucinogen use (and probably because of it).
If you’re worried about eating disorders, I’d suggest reading as much, and as much about Theron Randolph, MD, as you can, as these guys taking as much of your bank accounts as they could get their hands on are relying on caricatures of his work to put you on caricature (but certainly expensive and useless) diets. You may have to look pretty hard, as his salad days were back in the 1950’s, and he wasn’t popular then, either.
You should probably head to the nearest Reservation in your neck of the woods, to see if the Native American Church has a congregation operative there. The practicing members don’t seem to be running around acting strangely- I’d much rather have a chapter in my home town than to have a Klan chapter within a hundred miles (actually 1,000 miles) of my residence.
The one really great thing these drugs do is induce the symptoms of tardive dyskinesia although I don’t know much about their “therapeutic” power.
These accounts demonstrate total ineptitude on the part of the aforementioned “treating” shrinks. It’s guys like those in my home town who leave me the town’s leading “psychiatrist” on occasion, even though I’ve never been to medical school and obviously can’t legally get “psych” drugs unless I wanted to grow rauwolfia at home. I can certainly diagnose better than these “men of medicine” (I do have an HOD test, after all, which they’d believe to be total nonsense).
What I find amusing is the pseudo-double blind, which is frequently used to show that niacin is ineffective in treating the “schizophrenias”. What happens is that the placebo is some inert substance, making the flushing from the B3 a “tell” that you’re not in the placebo group and “unblinding” the experiment. Since the “experimenters” want the experimental process to fail, they never use stuff like niacinamide or inositol nicotinate to make their experiments truly blind, while doggedly insisting on the validity of their “experiments”.
I, too, am aware that the GOP isn’t filled with geeks. Unfortunately, the geeks seem to have taken over Party ideology, so that anyone who disagrees with them is automatically a dangerous traitor and agent of the Deep State, a Socialist infiltrator trying to destroy Party unity, and national ideology and social cohesion as well.
We aren’t dealing with coherent thought here. Even though there may be many excuses, I’d like the positive psychology addicts to tell me why unmedicated “schizophrenics” don’t get cancer, unlike the “healthy minded”, who frequently die of it before spreading their valuable genes throughout the universe.
This is an effort that fits into GOP social ideology. Remember that we’re dealing with a political party that advocates the Giant Firefight as an “anti-crime” measure in which so many people are armed that the most trivial disruption of the Urban Force will arouse the Armed Multitudes into blasting furiously away- unaware that “spray and pray” shooting is not a good notion to foster in crowded urban settings.
All this frenzied effort Mr. Dole, et. al. had to endure reminds me of the days I was treating various individuals for distorted perceptions with basic B3 and C therapy. Having read Linus Pauling and David Hawkins, MD, I made a point of warning the proper “clients” who I knew were gay, that gay males receiving megavitamins sometimes found that their sexual orientations involuntarily changed, and that I couldn’t do anything about this side effect of treatment, as I was dealing with his dysperceptions, instead.
Now, I find that Mr. Dole has had to undergo years of useless punitive treatment at the hands of bunglers with MD degrees in attempts to achieve, what for me, was a routine hazard of my sideline practices.
If I was to be named on this list of “authorities”, I’d want the creators of said list to use an alias instead of my real name.
Well, we do know that the executors of this defective study were praying for a hopeful outcome, which is why they went to such contortions in their attempts to find one.
Hoffer, and his buddy Humphry Osmond did a lot of that early research while both were in Saskatchewan, back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Were it not for the US DEA, psychedelic therapy would likely still be around in Canada.
Before I got too psychic, I’d try to find out if my client was low in magnesium, which I’d have to do with a therapeutic trial of magnesium salts.
Bad ideas in action. There’s no pleasure in this compulsive eating- it has more of the mental attributes of a necessity, like a compulsion of any kind.
You’ll be even more indignant when you realize these shrinks willfully remain ignorant of the basics of nutritional psychiatry, because the practitioner’s mind is closed to anything outside of what he learned in school or company-sponsored seminars.
I don’t know about akathisia, but I do know that GP’s most likely know squat about dysperceptions, so they don’t ask. They also don’t know about quantitative testing before “diagnosing”, so they wind up giving antidepressants to individuals who, unknown to them,. are showing early signs of the schizophrenia syndrome, the precise group whose individuals are most likely to lose their marbles when medicated with these drugs.
This is also likely to happen to shrinks with the same diagnostic problem difficulties, only they’re better at coming up with excuses than the GP’s.
I notice that these learned individuals made no mention of things like heavy metal poisoning, which can provoke real hyperactive behavior. But those are treatable with routine stuff like D-pen, which don’t have to be continued for decades. There are likely to be other things that induce “hyperactivity”, because “ADHD” is just a description and not a real diagnosis.
Niacinamide and C may be able to ease the hallucinations used at the basic level of 3g/day for each (1g ea. TID in doctorspeak) You shouldn’t flush, like you would with niacin (which is why I didn’t suggest it, instead of the amide). And you won’t go on the nod, like you did with the meds.
The problem isn’t lack of ability or keeping peer respect, but trying to convince a straight supervisor that I actually know what I’m doing with stuff and methods (s)he’s probably never seen or heard of, unless (s)he’s read a screed about quackery.
This is why I don’t listen to mental health professionals who like to tell me I’m going to seriously poison myself taking several grams of niacin and an equal amount of vitamin C every day, instead of their allegedly therapeutic drugs.
Alas, there’s no place for me among the peer specialists, as I recognize the principles of orthomolecular medicine and wouldn’t hesitate to use high levels of certain vitamins and minerals in treating some conditions, thereby making me an Evil Sorcerer of mental health who uses forbidden enchantments and substances, following the guidance of the renegade High Priests Hoffer and Osmond, and who should therefore be kept away from the “mentally ill”.
Psychiatric research isn’t going anywhere soon, because, for one, shrinks seem to believe their “diagnoses” are of real ailments. Kryptopyrolle (“mauve factor”) isn’t regarded as a biomarker because the positive results fall into different “diagnostic categories”, even though all the “categories” respond to the same B6+ zinc treatment.
Maybe it’s time to go “orthomolecular”. Although these individuals are heavily into biochemistry, they’re not believers in “therapeutic” drugs, but are heavy into the use of diet and/or nutrients for both acute and maintenance therapy. They’re also not fond of psychiatric “diagnoses” either. You might even learn things you weren’t taught in school.
It’s spelled “etiologies”. Some of us have better things to do than reiterate what clowns most shrinks are. That’s likely to be a given, anyway.
So this is a British idea in which one of their cops is a leader in the alleged treatment team. Too bad that most of the pohmies (Prisoners of Her Majesty’s Empire) I’ve talked to seem to believe that their officers are generally nitwits (one of the major reasons they don’t wear sidearms) who they wouldn’t trust to give them the correct time of day, much less listen and respond properly to their accounts of personal misery.
My mother had to endure her share of this when a psychologist decided that (a.) I was a schizophrenic and (b.) it was due to some kind of parental fumbling on her part. It wasn’t until a number of years later that I found out I’d been poisoned by copper-contaminated drinking water that made me dysperceptive as a result.
Maybe it’s whether you argue with your audios and how much you actually do (argue with them).
No- the trainees shrinks need to know more about medical illnesses that masquerade as psychiatric/ psychological “illnesses” than they do sociological difficulties, although they have to be aware of such things in any case.
You’ve got my vote.
He needs supervisors on nutrients, where they feel so good they aren’t thinking of suddenly stopping and letting their thoughts turn into jello.
For alcohol related issues, plain old nicotinic acid B3 is the substance of choice, particularly for withdrawals. I don’t know if flush-free B3, (inositol hexanicotinate?) would work as well, as I’m used to flush-filled nicotinic acid after several decades of using it, myself.
I’d say the researchers are too simple to study their subject’s background and the employers so greedy they’d sell their children at the drop of a hat, if it paid well.
Oops.
B1 is for beriberi.
Duplicate comment
One supplement for withdrawals that I know of is the use of mega niacin for alcohol withdrawals, having overseen a couple of them, when the friends of an individual whose style involved going cold turkey and collapsing on the street became worried and contacted me, knowing I had assisted in preventing adverse drug/alcohol reactions in others.
So- at last, another weirdo like me who believes that your diet plays an important role in maintaining or regaining one’s sanity. I’ve occasionally wondered if I lived on the same planet as some of the other commentators.
Don’t forget, sam, about its valuable use in covering up psychiatric treatment failures, helping the therapist feel less like the incompetent (s)he very likely is.
Not to worry about your BPD “diagnosis”, a proud inhabitant of the diagnostic wastebasket that’s usually given when the doctor has no idea what’s going on.
Journey into the surreal. Big Time Psychiatry and You. And they’ll tell you you know nothing and you’d better be forking over the billions to get to Psychiatric Heaven (maybe). And if anything bad happens to you, it’s your fault because you weren’t zombie enough and had a mind of your own.
The thought that “schizophrenics” are reacting to altered perceptions in a way that would be normal if we knew their components, seems too complex for shrinks to understand. Of course, an introduction to altered perceptions via hallucinogenic experience seems to be too dangerous for the psychiatric mind to understand. Maybe it’s too scary and they’re afraid of becoming permanently bonkers in the twinkling of an eye.
You have to distinguish the difference between science and scientism. The only real connection between science and scientism are the letters s, c, i, e, and n. Scientism is a dogma that claims the infallibility of past and present scientific conclusions, while actual science seeks to know if such conclusions are really true.
I’m just a psychiatric mechanic and not really good at providing spiritual comfort, but I do wonder about her B12 levels.
Well, the industry must do all it can to prevent pregnant women from taking B6 and zinc in the final trimester of pregnancy in order to sell expensive high-tech treatments that won’t work, as elevated serum copper seems to be the real reason for these “depressions”.
Ah, but if you recover from psychotic illnesses using unusual means- real medicine, nutrients, dietary avoidance, treating allergies, support groups like SA, etc., then Big Time Psychiatry will rise with righteous fury to tell the world how you’ve let yourself be deceived by scoundrels and are destined to finish your life drooling in the back wards of some institution.
The big hassle here is that “depression” is misinterpreted as a disease unto itself instead of a syndrome likely to have differing causes, which is why you have individuals carelessly labeled as suffering from a disease called depression, when such isn’t the case. This is also why you have patients with this “disease” losing their marbles when (erroneously) prescribed antidepressants.
The problem is that the alleged medical model of psychiatry isn’t medical at all, but a pseudo-medical model, as the alleged diseases are merely behavioral descriptions, rather than diseases unto themselves.
It seems to be a state secret that niacin can be used to remove the dangers associated with alcohol withdrawal, while as niacinamide, it can serve in aiding withdrawal from benzos. Of course, little money can be made by Big Pharma (or Big Hospitalization) as the withdrawal process is speeded up and your “medication” isn’t patented and thus isn’t lucrative.
I’ve overseen (home) alcohols before, but I haven’t supervised a benzo withdrawal, although I’ve read articles by the orthomolecular guys that suggests that they have done so.
Well, Steve, treatments that do work are likely to be frowned upon by our “professional” classes as forms of black magic, or maybe hypnotism, that are likely to direct youthful patients into subversive antisocial activities instead of leaving them bland vegetables.
Why are things like low magnesium, low zinc and unstable blood sugar coming to mind? Why am I thinking about niacinamide? Why am I curious about perceptual instability? I’m supposed to radiate reassurance and puff the skills of shrinks.
The problem to the question you’re asking, is that the answer is, “it depends.” It depends on user perceptual status, the kind of substances most commonly used as well as or in addition to cannabis, the presence and kind of users’ physical and social peculiarities, and so on.
Poor babies- actually having to do something positive for their patients in order to get paid for it.
This article illustrates the difference between real medicine and the pseudo-medical model that Big-Time Psychiatry considers medical (as well as demonstrating why I don’t have anything to do with most shrinks). It’s their own heads that have shrunk.
“Borderline Personality Disorder,” eh? You just got tossed into the Diagnostic Wastebasket, so the shrink wouldn’t have to face his own ineptitude, demonstrated by the ineffective series of ECT you just had.
I know, Steve, but remember, if I have to do psychiatric things, it’s as a kind of psychiatric mechanic seeing other people’s (professionals, actually) treatment failures, which is why I don’t do them very often because I can get in trouble, even if I’m “brilliantly” successful (for example, I lost a job at a residential treatment center for substance abusers when two guys “graduated” who weren’t supposed to, shocking the professional staff- I was so peeved, I never told the staff people I’d simply put them on niacinamide, which I could administer when the professionals had gone for the evening).
I’m glad I’m not spending any money for this certain-to-fail initiative. Depression, as the shrinks call it, isn’t an illness unto itself, but a syndrome (particular group of signs and symptoms) that can have any number of causes. I’m just a chump without formal psychiatric training, but I can think of several (thyroid, vitamin dependencies and deficiencies, heavy metal poisoning, hypoglycemia, cerebral allergies) that quickly come to mind while I’m sitting here typing. Notice that none of my examples can be readily treated with antidepressants or SSRI’s.
Think psychiatry doesn’t critically vet treatments? Follow psychiatry’s fight against the clinical use of vitamin B3 in psychiatric treatments, which seems to have taken on the nature of a crusade- ditch that dangerous vitamin and other equally dangerous substances like vitamin C for safe antipsychotic drugs (I’m sure all those patients with drug-induced dyskinesias will want to jump on this bandwagon and join the crusade, particularly when they discover manganese salts in competent hands can relieve this condition).
Time management problems? Take up tournament chess. The clock will show you how to manage time.
That was well put, Steve. I think the idea of the mind as a product of the brain and is dependent on its effective functioning is a little too deep for our present shrinks.
“Personality disorders” just reeks of the diagnostic wastebasket approach to psychiatric matters…”you don’t know what’s going on? Just dump the whole thing into this diagnostic wastebasket here”.
I find it unusual that shrinks would use a CNS depressant (anesthetic) in “antidepressant therapy”. It would seem that you’d have to ignore physiology to be a successful shrink, although you might be able to suppress suicidal ideation by leaving the patient so anesthetized that he/she would be incapable of any ideation.
Where do these places get their “alleged” doctors? Do they come from the Frankenstein Medical Institute? Many, if not most psych drugs have antihistaminic properties, so Bridgewater’s psychiatric “disciplinarians” are doing the equivalent of giving their patients downers and alcohol simultaneously. This will eventually come out of the woodwork when a patient dies or flips out (simultaneously thrashing the security staff in the process with the super strength they inadvertently gave him/her) or both.
When I read these articles, I have some difficulty with the psychotherapy stories about treating “mental” illnesses properly, as psychiatric “diagnoses” are just descriptions of syndromes that can have a number of possible origins that don’t all have the same treatment. There’s no “one size fits all” for the proper treatment of “mental” syndromes.
I’m a bit surprised they’re still being prescribed in such quantities. It was only 50+ years ago I first heard they were addictive and that withdrawing from them was worse than coming off heroin.
Maybe so, but if their institutional attitudes are frozen, they’re goners, like the French in 1940, when the Germans came.
These fumbling treatments for depression exist because it was believed that depression was an entity unto itself, rather than a sign that something was amiss with the sufferer that indicated further inquiry and/or examination was necessary.
Think of psychiatry as an army under siege. After only minimal gains, it has now been driven back to its starting point and feels itself in danger of total collapse, should it lose further intellectual territory.
These studies also don’t presume “Major Depressive Disorder” to be the wastebasket diagnosis it actually is, so they unknowingly have heterogeneous groups of patients. It would be truly remarkable if they did find some Universal Clinical Truth through such diagnostic “methods”.
I hate to quibble, but these drugs like ketamine, esketamine, etc. aren’t psychedelic drugs, but more closely related to anesthetics, illustrating the folly of using psych drugs on the delerious, thanks to these drugs, while under the illusion they’re tripping out, instead. (I hope I don’t sound too confusing)
This reminds me of the hubbub around PCP, aka phencyclidine, a similarly acting drug used as an animal anesthetic around 50 years ago- same properties, same tendency for inducing delerium in subjects, particularly after efforts using antipsychotics to “tranquilize” them when they were bumming out.
In the late 1950’s, H&O began to consider sobering experiences. They’d also gone to a peyote ceremony in Alberta at the invitation of the Blackfeet, who were trying to make their religious peyote ceremonies respectable to white governments. Shortly after this, they created a study using acid to simulate DT’s. While doing this, they discovered that the guys who had the psychedelic experiences instead of the “psychotomimetic” were the most likely to stay sober. From there, they became involved with psychedelic therapy in alcoholics, and devised protocols for proper usage to maximize good results. The government of Saskatchewan was so impressed, it authorized and began to use psychedelic therapy as a first line treatment for alcoholism throughout the province. The Americasn DEA was outraged and forced the province to discontinue psychedelic therapy for their alcoholic patients. (your government hard at work to protect youy from imaginary threats)
Well, the Native American Church uses them (well, peyote, at least) in ways beneficial to the members, as did the Province of Saskatchewan, until the US DEA clamped down on it for providing psychedelic experiences to alcoholics to help sober them up, when the Agency “knew” that this was “impossible”.
At the risk of getting electronically silenced, I’d suggest paying more attention to the work of Hoffer and Osmond, particularly their magnum opus- The Hallucinogens. Although long out of print, you may still find copies in university and college libraries (I’d have to shoot you if you tried to take my copy).
One of the problems I have with commenting is a result of having familiarity with orthomolecular medicine for 45+ years. Something that is old hat for me, such as nutrient therapy for schizophrenia syndromes, is bizarre and strange for readers who have psychosocial beliefs about the syndromes’ origins, so I’ll inadvertently write things that get my correspondence sent to the electronic wasteland instead of getting posted on the site.
Yes, your schizophrenia was indeed right when it told you esketamine was bad for you. Unfortunately, your schizophrenia couldn’t tell you about ketamine antagonists and the anesthesiologist didn’t know anything about the subject, which I can’t reveal if I want a comment to actually get printed.
Like most mental “diseases”, ADHD is a description and not an idenntity unto itself. Also, like many other of these “diseases”, the behaviors that give it its name are also likely to have a variety of origins and likely to have a variety of proper treatments, once you determine the specific identity of the condition you’re dealing with.
One of the common headaches about psychiatric “diagnosis” is that the shrinks pay little attention to your experiential world, thereby knowing little to nothing about your real mental status, raising the likelihood you’ll be ineptly or improperly treated by the shrink’s medication efforts.
Using selected nutrients instead of psych drugs and having done so for years, I find these arguments fairly bizarre, particularly since there’s no real improvement in the treatment groups, although there is a great deal of company puffery about their newest drugs after the alleged studies are done.
Lead is also responsible for inducing hyperactivity in children, which leads me to wonder why this isn’t routinely checked for prior to prescribing ritalin and other stimulants. Speed isn’t going to do you much good if you’re lead crazed, although the doctor can now believe you’re a disordered personality, to absolve himself/herself from guilt by bungling.
If I wanted psychedelic therapy, I’d go to see Maria Sabrina, but she must be gone by now, as she was old when the Wassons saw her back in the 1950’s.
I’m looking forward to seeing the DEA discover that there are hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms that grow wild in every state in the Union- the perpetual drone of helicopters over cattle country seeking manured fields, squads of “heroes” tramping through swamps as they seek the dreaded calamus, helicopters seeking infestations of jimsonweed to spray with herbicide- sights and sites worth seeing and mentioning.
What happens if you know more about psychedelics and hallucinogens than the doctor does?
Duplicate comment.
I wonder how much attention this army of counselers is paying to their students’/clients’ diets. I remember my school days and how I attempted to subsist on sorry school and snack food with lots of added sucrose and caffeine, plus alcohol on weekends. No wonder I was so miserable much of the time.
At least part of this is due to “schizophrenia” not being a single disease entity, so that these studies are attempts to find single “causes” for the existence of a polyglot entity. There should be no surprised all these sub-entities have confused seekers looking for for a single one.
This reminds me of a gentleman some friends of mine picked up while he was hitchhiking. He was a gay gent who happened to have a black belt in taekwando. When he was in a nasty mood, he’d go to a trashy bar in the heart of his hometown, where if he heard patrons badmouthing homosexuals, he’d flame on, and when the badmouthing patrons became irritated, he’d suddenly pay for his drink and leave, right after they’d ordered, which would give him time to get a head start on them.
When they came out, they’d see him dart down a nearby alley he’d previously scouted. If they followed, it meant they were actually headed for the local hospital’s emergency room as new patients, instead of heading for giving this queer the beating they thought he deserved.
Am I correct in suspecting that no effort was made to identify the origins of these suspected depressions? Depressed mood can arrive from numerous origins that naturally have numerous proper treatments- am I thinking of them because I’m a psychiatric mechanic and not a shrink or social worker?
You were likely high in serum copper and low in zinc, a common feature at the end of pregnancies. Psychiatrists aren’t going to tell you this because you’re chances of making them money will become limited, at best, should it be true. Zinc, B6, C and B-complex aren’t going to finance those MD vacation trips by themselves.
As a known practitioner of Crtimethink, I’m obliged to agree with you here, Steve.
It’s probably best to start with a hair sample to see what your manganese levels actually are, because you want to start with larger amounts, which you’ll then decrease when your symptomology does, as excess manganese can cause the same symptoms as the drug- induced dyskinesias- best to see if there’s an orthomolecular practitioner in your neighborhood who knows what they’re doing.
You wouldn’t want doctors treating TD with manganese, now, would you? It works when properly used but doesn’t provide the big bucks for manufacturers that having a patented drug does.
Looks like people seeking the “psychedelic experience” should devote their “pre-tripping” time to scaring up a copy of *The Hallucinogens*, by Hoffer and Osmond, which discusses psychedelic therapy in some detail, including contraindications for the use of these drugs. The book is now quite rare, as it was too pedestrian for both enthusiasts and enemies of psychedelic use.
The Hoffer/Osmond Diagnostic (HOD) test is still around, fortunately. If you have an orthomolecular therapist in town, he/she may have one, if you don’t know a weirdo like me, who also has one. (It was a screening instrument used to screen Canadian alcoholics in H&O’s tests of psychedelic therapy).
Well, if you were going to walk around in a cast 24 hours a day, it would seem that the likelihood you’d break the leg not in a cast would rise, particularly if you had to use stairs, as the cast would give you difficulties balancing while going up or down.
That’s what they’re called, but they hardly were. Unusual, yes- MD was Hoffer’s second doctorate, while Osmond spent the years that would have been a psychiatric residency as a ship’s surgeon crossing and recrossing the Atlantic on the convoys.
What is also missed is that Hoffer never had psychiatric training and that basic megavitamin therapy also used vitamin C, as well as B3.
I bet that Timothy Leary never went to a Peyote Ceremony, like old Humphry did, back in the 1950’s.
You just have to realize who’s considering someone else crazy and why.
The word was supposed to be “properly”- sorry about that.
Did any of these acolytes study the work of Hoffer and Osmond, who ran an LSD based program for alcoholics in Saskatchewan back in the 1960’s?
It appears not, as the acolytes still don’t know how to screen their patients perioerly, a process that eventually took the Canadians less than an hour, and which I’ve learned to do by myself. I even have an HOD test, which I’ve used for that purpose.
The Personality Disorder- a proud inhabitant of the Diagnostic Wastebasket. Need we say more?
The interesting thing about this as that wild psychedelics live in practically every state and in probably especially in most states where cattle owners pasture their herds.
I’d prefer New Jersey’s Earth House, if it’s still around. It places as much interest in your biophysical environment as the Soteria Houses do in your psychosocial environment, but not with filling you with the latest pharmaceuticals (or the older ones, for that matter.
This should come as no surprise. These skewed groups of “undesirables” are the usual subjects for drug toxicity tests, which they’ve been for decades (if not for centuries?). That they’re used for testing hallucinogens is just par for the course, even though they make poor subjects for testing these substances as our “powers that be” knew nothing about the contraindications for hallucinogen use (and probably because of it).
If you’re worried about eating disorders, I’d suggest reading as much, and as much about Theron Randolph, MD, as you can, as these guys taking as much of your bank accounts as they could get their hands on are relying on caricatures of his work to put you on caricature (but certainly expensive and useless) diets. You may have to look pretty hard, as his salad days were back in the 1950’s, and he wasn’t popular then, either.
You should probably head to the nearest Reservation in your neck of the woods, to see if the Native American Church has a congregation operative there. The practicing members don’t seem to be running around acting strangely- I’d much rather have a chapter in my home town than to have a Klan chapter within a hundred miles (actually 1,000 miles) of my residence.
The one really great thing these drugs do is induce the symptoms of tardive dyskinesia although I don’t know much about their “therapeutic” power.
These accounts demonstrate total ineptitude on the part of the aforementioned “treating” shrinks. It’s guys like those in my home town who leave me the town’s leading “psychiatrist” on occasion, even though I’ve never been to medical school and obviously can’t legally get “psych” drugs unless I wanted to grow rauwolfia at home. I can certainly diagnose better than these “men of medicine” (I do have an HOD test, after all, which they’d believe to be total nonsense).
What I find amusing is the pseudo-double blind, which is frequently used to show that niacin is ineffective in treating the “schizophrenias”. What happens is that the placebo is some inert substance, making the flushing from the B3 a “tell” that you’re not in the placebo group and “unblinding” the experiment. Since the “experimenters” want the experimental process to fail, they never use stuff like niacinamide or inositol nicotinate to make their experiments truly blind, while doggedly insisting on the validity of their “experiments”.
I, too, am aware that the GOP isn’t filled with geeks. Unfortunately, the geeks seem to have taken over Party ideology, so that anyone who disagrees with them is automatically a dangerous traitor and agent of the Deep State, a Socialist infiltrator trying to destroy Party unity, and national ideology and social cohesion as well.
We aren’t dealing with coherent thought here. Even though there may be many excuses, I’d like the positive psychology addicts to tell me why unmedicated “schizophrenics” don’t get cancer, unlike the “healthy minded”, who frequently die of it before spreading their valuable genes throughout the universe.
This is an effort that fits into GOP social ideology. Remember that we’re dealing with a political party that advocates the Giant Firefight as an “anti-crime” measure in which so many people are armed that the most trivial disruption of the Urban Force will arouse the Armed Multitudes into blasting furiously away- unaware that “spray and pray” shooting is not a good notion to foster in crowded urban settings.
All this frenzied effort Mr. Dole, et. al. had to endure reminds me of the days I was treating various individuals for distorted perceptions with basic B3 and C therapy. Having read Linus Pauling and David Hawkins, MD, I made a point of warning the proper “clients” who I knew were gay, that gay males receiving megavitamins sometimes found that their sexual orientations involuntarily changed, and that I couldn’t do anything about this side effect of treatment, as I was dealing with his dysperceptions, instead.
Now, I find that Mr. Dole has had to undergo years of useless punitive treatment at the hands of bunglers with MD degrees in attempts to achieve, what for me, was a routine hazard of my sideline practices.
If I was to be named on this list of “authorities”, I’d want the creators of said list to use an alias instead of my real name.
Well, we do know that the executors of this defective study were praying for a hopeful outcome, which is why they went to such contortions in their attempts to find one.
Hoffer, and his buddy Humphry Osmond did a lot of that early research while both were in Saskatchewan, back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. Were it not for the US DEA, psychedelic therapy would likely still be around in Canada.
Before I got too psychic, I’d try to find out if my client was low in magnesium, which I’d have to do with a therapeutic trial of magnesium salts.
Bad ideas in action. There’s no pleasure in this compulsive eating- it has more of the mental attributes of a necessity, like a compulsion of any kind.
You’ll be even more indignant when you realize these shrinks willfully remain ignorant of the basics of nutritional psychiatry, because the practitioner’s mind is closed to anything outside of what he learned in school or company-sponsored seminars.
I don’t know about akathisia, but I do know that GP’s most likely know squat about dysperceptions, so they don’t ask. They also don’t know about quantitative testing before “diagnosing”, so they wind up giving antidepressants to individuals who, unknown to them,. are showing early signs of the schizophrenia syndrome, the precise group whose individuals are most likely to lose their marbles when medicated with these drugs.
This is also likely to happen to shrinks with the same diagnostic problem difficulties, only they’re better at coming up with excuses than the GP’s.
I notice that these learned individuals made no mention of things like heavy metal poisoning, which can provoke real hyperactive behavior. But those are treatable with routine stuff like D-pen, which don’t have to be continued for decades. There are likely to be other things that induce “hyperactivity”, because “ADHD” is just a description and not a real diagnosis.
Niacinamide and C may be able to ease the hallucinations used at the basic level of 3g/day for each (1g ea. TID in doctorspeak) You shouldn’t flush, like you would with niacin (which is why I didn’t suggest it, instead of the amide). And you won’t go on the nod, like you did with the meds.
The problem isn’t lack of ability or keeping peer respect, but trying to convince a straight supervisor that I actually know what I’m doing with stuff and methods (s)he’s probably never seen or heard of, unless (s)he’s read a screed about quackery.
This is why I don’t listen to mental health professionals who like to tell me I’m going to seriously poison myself taking several grams of niacin and an equal amount of vitamin C every day, instead of their allegedly therapeutic drugs.
Alas, there’s no place for me among the peer specialists, as I recognize the principles of orthomolecular medicine and wouldn’t hesitate to use high levels of certain vitamins and minerals in treating some conditions, thereby making me an Evil Sorcerer of mental health who uses forbidden enchantments and substances, following the guidance of the renegade High Priests Hoffer and Osmond, and who should therefore be kept away from the “mentally ill”.
Psychiatric research isn’t going anywhere soon, because, for one, shrinks seem to believe their “diagnoses” are of real ailments. Kryptopyrolle (“mauve factor”) isn’t regarded as a biomarker because the positive results fall into different “diagnostic categories”, even though all the “categories” respond to the same B6+ zinc treatment.
Maybe it’s time to go “orthomolecular”. Although these individuals are heavily into biochemistry, they’re not believers in “therapeutic” drugs, but are heavy into the use of diet and/or nutrients for both acute and maintenance therapy. They’re also not fond of psychiatric “diagnoses” either. You might even learn things you weren’t taught in school.
It’s spelled “etiologies”. Some of us have better things to do than reiterate what clowns most shrinks are. That’s likely to be a given, anyway.
So this is a British idea in which one of their cops is a leader in the alleged treatment team. Too bad that most of the pohmies (Prisoners of Her Majesty’s Empire) I’ve talked to seem to believe that their officers are generally nitwits (one of the major reasons they don’t wear sidearms) who they wouldn’t trust to give them the correct time of day, much less listen and respond properly to their accounts of personal misery.
My mother had to endure her share of this when a psychologist decided that (a.) I was a schizophrenic and (b.) it was due to some kind of parental fumbling on her part. It wasn’t until a number of years later that I found out I’d been poisoned by copper-contaminated drinking water that made me dysperceptive as a result.
Maybe it’s whether you argue with your audios and how much you actually do (argue with them).
No- the trainees shrinks need to know more about medical illnesses that masquerade as psychiatric/ psychological “illnesses” than they do sociological difficulties, although they have to be aware of such things in any case.
You’ve got my vote.
He needs supervisors on nutrients, where they feel so good they aren’t thinking of suddenly stopping and letting their thoughts turn into jello.
For alcohol related issues, plain old nicotinic acid B3 is the substance of choice, particularly for withdrawals. I don’t know if flush-free B3, (inositol hexanicotinate?) would work as well, as I’m used to flush-filled nicotinic acid after several decades of using it, myself.
I’d say the researchers are too simple to study their subject’s background and the employers so greedy they’d sell their children at the drop of a hat, if it paid well.
Oops.
B1 is for beriberi.
Duplicate comment
One supplement for withdrawals that I know of is the use of mega niacin for alcohol withdrawals, having overseen a couple of them, when the friends of an individual whose style involved going cold turkey and collapsing on the street became worried and contacted me, knowing I had assisted in preventing adverse drug/alcohol reactions in others.
So- at last, another weirdo like me who believes that your diet plays an important role in maintaining or regaining one’s sanity. I’ve occasionally wondered if I lived on the same planet as some of the other commentators.
Don’t forget, sam, about its valuable use in covering up psychiatric treatment failures, helping the therapist feel less like the incompetent (s)he very likely is.
Not to worry about your BPD “diagnosis”, a proud inhabitant of the diagnostic wastebasket that’s usually given when the doctor has no idea what’s going on.
Journey into the surreal. Big Time Psychiatry and You. And they’ll tell you you know nothing and you’d better be forking over the billions to get to Psychiatric Heaven (maybe). And if anything bad happens to you, it’s your fault because you weren’t zombie enough and had a mind of your own.
The thought that “schizophrenics” are reacting to altered perceptions in a way that would be normal if we knew their components, seems too complex for shrinks to understand. Of course, an introduction to altered perceptions via hallucinogenic experience seems to be too dangerous for the psychiatric mind to understand. Maybe it’s too scary and they’re afraid of becoming permanently bonkers in the twinkling of an eye.
You have to distinguish the difference between science and scientism. The only real connection between science and scientism are the letters s, c, i, e, and n. Scientism is a dogma that claims the infallibility of past and present scientific conclusions, while actual science seeks to know if such conclusions are really true.
I’m just a psychiatric mechanic and not really good at providing spiritual comfort, but I do wonder about her B12 levels.