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, John. If our politicians actually did do something serious about addiction, they wouldn’t have anything serious to campaign about during their following election campaign seasons, now, would they.
Well, if one is a real peer and knows what they’re doing, they’d be likely to be treated with fear and suspicion until they’re canned by their overseeing professionals, no matter what the degree of improvement was ever found in their subjects. I remember the underlying terror in my superiors’ eyes when they discovered I was likely responsible for a couple of their subjects graduating from an alcohol/drug treatment program when they weren’t supposed to (well, I probably was the perpetrator) after they’re “diagnoses” were that the pair were hopeless cases and bound to stay that way. Although they wanted to know how I did it, I became so peeved I didn’t tell them I simply used niacinamide, 3g/day for both of them (I worked PM shifts, so it was easy to secretly treat them). I was also worried they’d try to keep me from getting unemployment because I was “medicating” residents.
Being on vitamins for 45 years, I find myself reading the psychiatric excuses for this sort of thing amusing, in a dark sort of way. If these Big Time Shrinks found out about me, they’d beg me to stop poisoning myself and get into proper treatment with safe proper drugs. This article helps me realize that Big Time Psychiatry is led by delusional medicos (and who’d want to be doped up by delusional individuals with poisonous neurochemicals?).
“But in the article context I don’t know what their training was like”. Think monkey see, monkey do and you’ll be right on the money (monkey?).
I’d prefer the Earth House in New Jersey, where the emphasis is upon improving your mental health by improving your physical health, but then I’m this site’s materialist (and New Jersey’s a lot closer than California).
I should also mention how unstable blood sugar can also induce “mental” symptoms that probably won’t be caught by many therapists- also a reason to avoid refined carbs, sweets, caffeine and the like, sometimes hard to do in Britain with its regular 4PM tea and sugary cookies’ ritual (aka carbs, sucrose and caffeine).
I suspect you didn’t have any of those alleged diagnoses you got when you were a patient, but maybe some kind of cerebral allergy that might have been relieved by the special diet you were put on in England, in which junk food levels were low or nonexistent. You can probably see similar things in some of the patients you sit for. Look for them, as it will give you something to do and also give you the outside chance to do things for the food sensitive “psychiatric” patients. In the meantime, stay away from caffeine, as it’s likely to increase your emotional lability (in addition to the institutional junk food).
I’m glad I’m not presently depressed. I’d hate to put my sanity into the hands of psychological and psychiatric fumblers and bumblers.
It’s a hard subject to discuss, because the individuals who know the most are either outlaws like Hoffer and Osmond were, or members of a despised race, like the members of the Native American Church.
I find this to be more than a trifle bizarre. Did it come on because one of the side effects of modern antipsychotics is that your weight doubles if you’re on them for any length of time, thanks to a now ravenous appetite? I think ads promoting this might have an amusing bizarre motif, maybe featuring “testimonials” from obese spokespeople (“before I saw the shrink, I only weighed 97 pounds-now I’m 300, at least!”) who were once anorexics.
Have these scholars realized they just provided a rationale for fasting and diets selected to inhibit inflammatory food reactions? They’re doing the unthinkable- providing treatments for some conditions other than patented psych drugs.
Hard to say, as the late Carl Pfeiffer was an orthomolecular guy, who, like Abram Hoffer, had a large part of his patient load consisting of other people’s treatment failures. It would also depend on exposure to anticholinergic drugs- of course the antipsychotics raise your histamine level, but the drugs for suppressing their side effects don’t.
Yes, but you could handle a gigantic client load if you only had to see many of them once, or for a few times.
ETC is hanging around the same way muzzle loading artillery did. The technology of the first half of the 19th Century wasn’t developed enough to develop a breech strong enough to handle the explosive burst of artillery propellant without disintegrating the gun.
Maybe their internal adrenochrome has kicked in. It is a metabolic product.
These guys would do well to learn about supernutrition, which would fit into their program well, as they are interested in their residents’ (“patient” doesn’t work well here) physical and mental well being.
So you never examine your “ADHD” sufferers to see if they might have elevated lead, even though that’s known to produce hyperactivity. Of course you don’t believe in using hair samples to test for trace mineral levels, because an “authority” who has never used them pronounced them to be useless.
Psychiatrists, despite this jive about chemical imbalances, also tend to miss the ones that are there. One of the most striking ones, in my experience, made the news about 45 years ago, when a chronic patient in one of our state facilities, had his hair turn green, to the amazement of all. He’d been vegetating in the back wards for years and nobody paid any attention to him until his hair turned green. I don’t know if any of the savants of the day realized he had Wilson’s Disease after his hair turned green, but none of them seemed to realize what was going on at the time and I was only beginning to study trace mineral levels and mental functioning and I only found out what was going on when I realized the consequences of Wilsons Disease (inability to excrete copper).
It’s people like those that you mentioned who are the reasons(?) that I’m periodically the best “psychiatrist” in my home town, despite never having been to medical school nor graduate school, unable to prescribe any drugs, much less psych drugs, have no office and have never taken up popular psych fads in decades.
We’re dealing with feeble and inept “experts” here.
This comes as no surprise as tame company-inspired shrinks aren’t going to inquire about much of anything beyond the company backed “symptom questionnaire” in their initial interviews, which means they won’t catch perceptual distortions that should influence proper treatments- and are also a contraindication for antidepressant prescribing.
Duplicate comment.
I’ve enjoyed what Abram Hoffer did when illness compelled him to stop working. He willed his patients to his secretary, who had picked up a doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine while working for him for 30 or so years. On several occasions, in his articles he’d remarked how she was frequently better with his patients than he was.
Adrenochrome would be the perfect candidate for the shrinks- it lasts a long time and you lose insight that you’re buzzed so you can have strange thoughts and do strange things without realizing they are strange. Plus, it isn’t a psychedelic.
I’d probably enjoy being a specialist, but I’d never get by, because of a drawback the author didn’t mention- that of the specialist being more knowledgeable than his/her professional, something similar to owning a dog who was smarter than you were.
I’d already had such an experience at my last MH related job at a residential treatment center for substance abusers, where a new hire had run a gent who’d deliberately cut himself to the hospital, leaving the other residents behind, and one of them called me.
The next afternoon I was sitting in the flunkies’ office wondering if B3 would help this guy, when another resident came to the door and asked me it I thought he was schizophrenic, so I gave him a session with my HOD test, which I kept on the property at the time, and he scored in the “schizophrenic” range, so I suggested he see about B3 (amide, because it doesn’t induce flushing) and educate himself with How to Live with Schizophrenia.
He began to take the B3, whereupon the cutting guy became fascinated and started the B3 himself, both getting 3g/afternoon (only on my shift) unbeknownst to the clinical staff. Both graduated from the program, despite an assessment from the clinical staff on their admissions that neither would.
Naturally, the clinicians called me on the carpet, upset that their residents both graduated despite their awful prognoses (they must have talked to their new graduates, baffled that they were graduating), making awful faces and noises. I refused to tell them, as I suspected they’d accuse me of medicating their patients and I wanted my unemployment free of having to dispute them, as B3 isn’t a drug, plus, I didn’t want to keep my job in order to watch patients fail their treatments out of staff ignorance.
The real problem for psychiatry in reviving psychedelic therapy is how to ignore and/or denigrate the work of Hoffer and Osmond, who not only gave us the words “hallucinogen” (Hoffer) and “psychedelic” (Osmond), but devised a psychedelic treatment for alcoholism that the Province of Saskatchewan adopted, until the US Drug Enforcement Authority forced it to stop.
These evil geniuses not only devised this treatment, but also methods of quick initial screening to ensure the safety of their subjects (the infamous HOD test I sometimes mention here in MIA, plus items that can be quickly picked up on during an initial interview).
Removed for moderation.
No problem seen here. When you’re “seriously mentally ill” is when you’re most likely to have become “cosmetically” ill, where you look and act crazy enough so that the most casual observer can tell you aren’t “playing with a full deck”.
Picture yourself as a clerk in a gun store when George Washington, complete with the skin-tight pants and tri-cornered hat rushes into your store demanding to buy an AK or M16 lookalike because British agents are following him down the street and he needs to run them off by showing them he’s armed and carrying hundreds of rounds of ammunition preloaded into 30-shot magazines. Unless you belong to some outfit like the Proud Boys, who don’t believe people with native ancestry are real Americans and that monstrous conspiracies involving thousands of secret members are running our governments, the proposed sale is a no go.
If he treated his patients with voodoo, he’s liable to have more success that a shrink using the newest academic methods.
More like a sorry bunch of fumblers who are able to convince the public they know what they’re doing. As an orthomolecular outlaw, I try to avoid such individuals, not hard to do when you use niacin for perceptual distortions (aka schizophrenia syndrome), or magnesium for anxiety (assorted “personality” disorders). The hard thing to do is not bad mouthing some speaker who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and you know it and (s)he is unaware of their ignorance.
Study after medical school and after getting that license seems to be a rare effort. Nobody seems to know squat about postpartum depression, so they don’t realize they’re not dealing with a “mood disorder” that’s best not treated with psych drugs, but with zinc (and maybe B6 to get the zinc working) to excise the excess serum copper, the likely source of postpartum depressions, and probably various other nutrients.
You failed because you overlooked the big bucks in store for manufacturers and providers, should one of them find the Philosopher’s Antidepressant that actually works. Sorry I didn’t realize my first comment loaded OK.
You failed because you overlooked the big bucks in store for providers and manufacturers alike. Much of this manufacturing labor is done in search of the big financial killing, should the Philosopher’s Antidepressant be eventually discovered by the company that can successfully ride the waves of adversity in the search for this Miracle Medication.
Well, personalized treatment for “depression” is possible, but it’s not going to be with drugs alone. Since “depression” is a syndrome and not a disease unto itself, it’s necessary to find out what’s inducing it, in order to provide proper and appropriate treatment.
“Precision psychiatry” might have some merit, but not when it’s inextricably linked to pharmacological “treatments” and “cures”. There are many things outside the brain that can induce disordered emotions and moods, but not that many that will succumb to pharmacological agents alone.
I’ve come across the use of manganese salts for movement disorders related to psych drugs in 30 year old Journals of Orthomolecular Medicine. I realize that psychiatry is slow to grasp simple medical realities, but this is ridiculous. Of course, this is understandable because there are no megabucks to be realized in treating complex diseases with simple (home?) treatments, but this is indeed ridiculous.
Izumi was just the architect, but Humphry Osmond, superintendent at nearby Weyburn, one of the worst mental institutions in the world when he first took over, was a pioneer in letting his patients go to town when they wanted to.
I wonder if any of the architects decided to approximate patients’ experiences in a mental institution by walking around in one while under the influence of hallucinogens. It’s not that unusual- a chap name Kiyo Izumi spent time in the old Saskatchewan institution at Weyburn, while under the influence of LSD, to see how the patients experienced the place. This is before he designed one of North America’s first new hospitals in Yorkton, Saskatchewan
Since I’ve read a number of pieces by and about Temple Grandin, I’ve drifted away from popular notions about autism, although the squeeze machine sounds like an interesting idea.
Well, the first thing overlooked was that depression isn’t a disease at all, but a syndrome-a collection of signs and symptoms that can have any of multiple origins as causes. This is why antidepressants are frequently useless or harmful, particularly for “PPD”, which is frequently brought on by copper excess, or “dysperceptive depression”, where the doctor doesn’t notice, or ignores his/her patient’s perceptual status and ongoing perceptual distortions and/or irregularities.
Your experimental group would have probably done even better had the experimenters done things like trace mineral analyses and testing perceptual stability to determine what nutrients to use for each member of your experimental group, but that would deprive the experimenters efforts to put uniform groups together.
Steve. You’re probably right about these awareness campaigns, but that’s easy for me to say, as I’m one of the least likely readers to seek the “mental health assistance” the spokespeople are usually talking about. I doubt if the professionals would like to see individuals seeking mental health assistance at the supplements’ counter of their local pharmacies or big box stores, or even going to the pharmacy counter to ask for bulk 500mg. niacin in the 1000 tablet bottle.
Usually, if I have a “client”, it’s due to some professional’s failed treatment, so I have to find out what’s going on in a symptomatic individual, in order to treat it with the correct nutrients, if I can. I use various combinations of vitamins (and sometimes minerals and amino acids) if I can’t find something out of my league, such as thyroid problems, where I’d recommend a proper GP. I couldn’t prescribe anything, even if I wanted to.
Nothing except fatigue, but the abovementioned big-time docs would certainly find something pathological was going on.
But wait until you hear the outcry about nutrients being dangerous. I notice someone’s busy telling us how dangerous Vitamin C is, now that the pandemics upon us, based on the bad experiences of two teenage females in unclear circumstances.
I probably should agree with them. When I first started to use ascorbate regularly in multigram daily quantities, I was working outdoors on a seismic crew in the dead of winter. It was hard on me , because my cohorts on the outfit’s survey crew repeatedly kept falling ill, while I had to work over a month straight, as we had no days off and I never got bronchial ailments or the flu, despite smoking cigarettes back then.
He also misses the idea of treating chronic diseases without drugs, but with diet and nutrients, as well as exercise and activities. For example, megadose niacin is the best treatment at the moment for abnormal cholesterol, but there are no fortunes to be made from using it therapeutically- the reason there are so many useless cholesterol drugs is that pharmaceutical companies are much more interested in turning a profit than actually treating abnormal cholesterol properly. Big-time medicine is actually just a part of this battle for the bucks.
I suspect inflatable furniture would be the place to start.
A corollary to this is when shrinks find out if you’re using substances like vitamin B3 and/or mega-ascorbate. Then the shrink goes into contortions about how you’re destroying yourself with these venomous substances, maybe topping his lecture with symptoms of horror, as though you’re going to turn into a werewolf before his very eyes (before you tear him to pieces, of course).
One of the things that seem to be missing in these arguments is the effect of diet.
Let me use the example of the Turkish troops who were captured by the Chinese when Gen MacArthur let the Chinese overwhelm his overextended troops. Although our GI’s suffered miserably in Chinese prison camps, the Turks didn’t- being members of a peasant army in a poor society, they started their captivity by consuming all the edible weeds in their camps and saving their seeds (I don’t imagine that the rats in their camps lasted very long, either). Unlike our captive GI’s, they were still in decent shape when they were repatriated, as they’d supplemented their miserable Chinese diets with anything edible they could get their hands on.
Since I don’t use medications or see therapists, I get to watch MH professionals go into contortions if I get annoyed enough to tell them that (A.) I’m schizophrenic and that (B.) I don’t use meds at all, but take mega-nutrients and watch what I eat and drink while paying attention to whatever drugs I might be offered (no stimulants or alcohol, please). I think that sometimes they’re wondering if I might suddenly go on a rampage.
Just prior to my ongoing romance with orthomolecular medicine, I was involved with hallucinogenic drugs and substances, one early project being finding antidotes to deliria brought on by PCP/ketamine type drugs, which will leave you truly delirious if some ER type doc gives you an antipsychotic “antidote” as treatment ( I found that l-glutamine’s far better than these drugs, even though it’s never been considered an antipsychotic substance).
This is the sort of thing that happens when shrinks don’t explore the perceptual status of their patients, but rely on “diagnostic jive” to guide their prescribing, ignoring the simple reality that individuals with numerous perceptual distortions shouldn’t get stimulants, no matter what the DSM “diagnosis” states is proper.
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.
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, John. If our politicians actually did do something serious about addiction, they wouldn’t have anything serious to campaign about during their following election campaign seasons, now, would they.
Well, if one is a real peer and knows what they’re doing, they’d be likely to be treated with fear and suspicion until they’re canned by their overseeing professionals, no matter what the degree of improvement was ever found in their subjects. I remember the underlying terror in my superiors’ eyes when they discovered I was likely responsible for a couple of their subjects graduating from an alcohol/drug treatment program when they weren’t supposed to (well, I probably was the perpetrator) after they’re “diagnoses” were that the pair were hopeless cases and bound to stay that way. Although they wanted to know how I did it, I became so peeved I didn’t tell them I simply used niacinamide, 3g/day for both of them (I worked PM shifts, so it was easy to secretly treat them). I was also worried they’d try to keep me from getting unemployment because I was “medicating” residents.
Being on vitamins for 45 years, I find myself reading the psychiatric excuses for this sort of thing amusing, in a dark sort of way. If these Big Time Shrinks found out about me, they’d beg me to stop poisoning myself and get into proper treatment with safe proper drugs. This article helps me realize that Big Time Psychiatry is led by delusional medicos (and who’d want to be doped up by delusional individuals with poisonous neurochemicals?).
“But in the article context I don’t know what their training was like”. Think monkey see, monkey do and you’ll be right on the money (monkey?).
I’d prefer the Earth House in New Jersey, where the emphasis is upon improving your mental health by improving your physical health, but then I’m this site’s materialist (and New Jersey’s a lot closer than California).
I should also mention how unstable blood sugar can also induce “mental” symptoms that probably won’t be caught by many therapists- also a reason to avoid refined carbs, sweets, caffeine and the like, sometimes hard to do in Britain with its regular 4PM tea and sugary cookies’ ritual (aka carbs, sucrose and caffeine).
I suspect you didn’t have any of those alleged diagnoses you got when you were a patient, but maybe some kind of cerebral allergy that might have been relieved by the special diet you were put on in England, in which junk food levels were low or nonexistent. You can probably see similar things in some of the patients you sit for. Look for them, as it will give you something to do and also give you the outside chance to do things for the food sensitive “psychiatric” patients. In the meantime, stay away from caffeine, as it’s likely to increase your emotional lability (in addition to the institutional junk food).
I’m glad I’m not presently depressed. I’d hate to put my sanity into the hands of psychological and psychiatric fumblers and bumblers.
It’s a hard subject to discuss, because the individuals who know the most are either outlaws like Hoffer and Osmond were, or members of a despised race, like the members of the Native American Church.
I find this to be more than a trifle bizarre. Did it come on because one of the side effects of modern antipsychotics is that your weight doubles if you’re on them for any length of time, thanks to a now ravenous appetite? I think ads promoting this might have an amusing bizarre motif, maybe featuring “testimonials” from obese spokespeople (“before I saw the shrink, I only weighed 97 pounds-now I’m 300, at least!”) who were once anorexics.
Have these scholars realized they just provided a rationale for fasting and diets selected to inhibit inflammatory food reactions? They’re doing the unthinkable- providing treatments for some conditions other than patented psych drugs.
Hard to say, as the late Carl Pfeiffer was an orthomolecular guy, who, like Abram Hoffer, had a large part of his patient load consisting of other people’s treatment failures. It would also depend on exposure to anticholinergic drugs- of course the antipsychotics raise your histamine level, but the drugs for suppressing their side effects don’t.
Yes, but you could handle a gigantic client load if you only had to see many of them once, or for a few times.
ETC is hanging around the same way muzzle loading artillery did. The technology of the first half of the 19th Century wasn’t developed enough to develop a breech strong enough to handle the explosive burst of artillery propellant without disintegrating the gun.
Maybe their internal adrenochrome has kicked in. It is a metabolic product.
These guys would do well to learn about supernutrition, which would fit into their program well, as they are interested in their residents’ (“patient” doesn’t work well here) physical and mental well being.
So you never examine your “ADHD” sufferers to see if they might have elevated lead, even though that’s known to produce hyperactivity. Of course you don’t believe in using hair samples to test for trace mineral levels, because an “authority” who has never used them pronounced them to be useless.
Psychiatrists, despite this jive about chemical imbalances, also tend to miss the ones that are there. One of the most striking ones, in my experience, made the news about 45 years ago, when a chronic patient in one of our state facilities, had his hair turn green, to the amazement of all. He’d been vegetating in the back wards for years and nobody paid any attention to him until his hair turned green. I don’t know if any of the savants of the day realized he had Wilson’s Disease after his hair turned green, but none of them seemed to realize what was going on at the time and I was only beginning to study trace mineral levels and mental functioning and I only found out what was going on when I realized the consequences of Wilsons Disease (inability to excrete copper).
It’s people like those that you mentioned who are the reasons(?) that I’m periodically the best “psychiatrist” in my home town, despite never having been to medical school nor graduate school, unable to prescribe any drugs, much less psych drugs, have no office and have never taken up popular psych fads in decades.
We’re dealing with feeble and inept “experts” here.
This comes as no surprise as tame company-inspired shrinks aren’t going to inquire about much of anything beyond the company backed “symptom questionnaire” in their initial interviews, which means they won’t catch perceptual distortions that should influence proper treatments- and are also a contraindication for antidepressant prescribing.
Duplicate comment.
I’ve enjoyed what Abram Hoffer did when illness compelled him to stop working. He willed his patients to his secretary, who had picked up a doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine while working for him for 30 or so years. On several occasions, in his articles he’d remarked how she was frequently better with his patients than he was.
Adrenochrome would be the perfect candidate for the shrinks- it lasts a long time and you lose insight that you’re buzzed so you can have strange thoughts and do strange things without realizing they are strange. Plus, it isn’t a psychedelic.
I’d probably enjoy being a specialist, but I’d never get by, because of a drawback the author didn’t mention- that of the specialist being more knowledgeable than his/her professional, something similar to owning a dog who was smarter than you were.
I’d already had such an experience at my last MH related job at a residential treatment center for substance abusers, where a new hire had run a gent who’d deliberately cut himself to the hospital, leaving the other residents behind, and one of them called me.
The next afternoon I was sitting in the flunkies’ office wondering if B3 would help this guy, when another resident came to the door and asked me it I thought he was schizophrenic, so I gave him a session with my HOD test, which I kept on the property at the time, and he scored in the “schizophrenic” range, so I suggested he see about B3 (amide, because it doesn’t induce flushing) and educate himself with How to Live with Schizophrenia.
He began to take the B3, whereupon the cutting guy became fascinated and started the B3 himself, both getting 3g/afternoon (only on my shift) unbeknownst to the clinical staff. Both graduated from the program, despite an assessment from the clinical staff on their admissions that neither would.
Naturally, the clinicians called me on the carpet, upset that their residents both graduated despite their awful prognoses (they must have talked to their new graduates, baffled that they were graduating), making awful faces and noises. I refused to tell them, as I suspected they’d accuse me of medicating their patients and I wanted my unemployment free of having to dispute them, as B3 isn’t a drug, plus, I didn’t want to keep my job in order to watch patients fail their treatments out of staff ignorance.
The real problem for psychiatry in reviving psychedelic therapy is how to ignore and/or denigrate the work of Hoffer and Osmond, who not only gave us the words “hallucinogen” (Hoffer) and “psychedelic” (Osmond), but devised a psychedelic treatment for alcoholism that the Province of Saskatchewan adopted, until the US Drug Enforcement Authority forced it to stop.
These evil geniuses not only devised this treatment, but also methods of quick initial screening to ensure the safety of their subjects (the infamous HOD test I sometimes mention here in MIA, plus items that can be quickly picked up on during an initial interview).
Removed for moderation.
No problem seen here. When you’re “seriously mentally ill” is when you’re most likely to have become “cosmetically” ill, where you look and act crazy enough so that the most casual observer can tell you aren’t “playing with a full deck”.
Picture yourself as a clerk in a gun store when George Washington, complete with the skin-tight pants and tri-cornered hat rushes into your store demanding to buy an AK or M16 lookalike because British agents are following him down the street and he needs to run them off by showing them he’s armed and carrying hundreds of rounds of ammunition preloaded into 30-shot magazines. Unless you belong to some outfit like the Proud Boys, who don’t believe people with native ancestry are real Americans and that monstrous conspiracies involving thousands of secret members are running our governments, the proposed sale is a no go.
If he treated his patients with voodoo, he’s liable to have more success that a shrink using the newest academic methods.
More like a sorry bunch of fumblers who are able to convince the public they know what they’re doing. As an orthomolecular outlaw, I try to avoid such individuals, not hard to do when you use niacin for perceptual distortions (aka schizophrenia syndrome), or magnesium for anxiety (assorted “personality” disorders). The hard thing to do is not bad mouthing some speaker who doesn’t know what he’s talking about and you know it and (s)he is unaware of their ignorance.
Study after medical school and after getting that license seems to be a rare effort. Nobody seems to know squat about postpartum depression, so they don’t realize they’re not dealing with a “mood disorder” that’s best not treated with psych drugs, but with zinc (and maybe B6 to get the zinc working) to excise the excess serum copper, the likely source of postpartum depressions, and probably various other nutrients.
You failed because you overlooked the big bucks in store for manufacturers and providers, should one of them find the Philosopher’s Antidepressant that actually works. Sorry I didn’t realize my first comment loaded OK.
You failed because you overlooked the big bucks in store for providers and manufacturers alike. Much of this manufacturing labor is done in search of the big financial killing, should the Philosopher’s Antidepressant be eventually discovered by the company that can successfully ride the waves of adversity in the search for this Miracle Medication.
Well, personalized treatment for “depression” is possible, but it’s not going to be with drugs alone. Since “depression” is a syndrome and not a disease unto itself, it’s necessary to find out what’s inducing it, in order to provide proper and appropriate treatment.
“Precision psychiatry” might have some merit, but not when it’s inextricably linked to pharmacological “treatments” and “cures”. There are many things outside the brain that can induce disordered emotions and moods, but not that many that will succumb to pharmacological agents alone.
I’ve come across the use of manganese salts for movement disorders related to psych drugs in 30 year old Journals of Orthomolecular Medicine. I realize that psychiatry is slow to grasp simple medical realities, but this is ridiculous. Of course, this is understandable because there are no megabucks to be realized in treating complex diseases with simple (home?) treatments, but this is indeed ridiculous.
Izumi was just the architect, but Humphry Osmond, superintendent at nearby Weyburn, one of the worst mental institutions in the world when he first took over, was a pioneer in letting his patients go to town when they wanted to.
I wonder if any of the architects decided to approximate patients’ experiences in a mental institution by walking around in one while under the influence of hallucinogens. It’s not that unusual- a chap name Kiyo Izumi spent time in the old Saskatchewan institution at Weyburn, while under the influence of LSD, to see how the patients experienced the place. This is before he designed one of North America’s first new hospitals in Yorkton, Saskatchewan
Since I’ve read a number of pieces by and about Temple Grandin, I’ve drifted away from popular notions about autism, although the squeeze machine sounds like an interesting idea.
Well, the first thing overlooked was that depression isn’t a disease at all, but a syndrome-a collection of signs and symptoms that can have any of multiple origins as causes. This is why antidepressants are frequently useless or harmful, particularly for “PPD”, which is frequently brought on by copper excess, or “dysperceptive depression”, where the doctor doesn’t notice, or ignores his/her patient’s perceptual status and ongoing perceptual distortions and/or irregularities.
Your experimental group would have probably done even better had the experimenters done things like trace mineral analyses and testing perceptual stability to determine what nutrients to use for each member of your experimental group, but that would deprive the experimenters efforts to put uniform groups together.
Steve. You’re probably right about these awareness campaigns, but that’s easy for me to say, as I’m one of the least likely readers to seek the “mental health assistance” the spokespeople are usually talking about. I doubt if the professionals would like to see individuals seeking mental health assistance at the supplements’ counter of their local pharmacies or big box stores, or even going to the pharmacy counter to ask for bulk 500mg. niacin in the 1000 tablet bottle.
Usually, if I have a “client”, it’s due to some professional’s failed treatment, so I have to find out what’s going on in a symptomatic individual, in order to treat it with the correct nutrients, if I can. I use various combinations of vitamins (and sometimes minerals and amino acids) if I can’t find something out of my league, such as thyroid problems, where I’d recommend a proper GP. I couldn’t prescribe anything, even if I wanted to.
Nothing except fatigue, but the abovementioned big-time docs would certainly find something pathological was going on.
But wait until you hear the outcry about nutrients being dangerous. I notice someone’s busy telling us how dangerous Vitamin C is, now that the pandemics upon us, based on the bad experiences of two teenage females in unclear circumstances.
I probably should agree with them. When I first started to use ascorbate regularly in multigram daily quantities, I was working outdoors on a seismic crew in the dead of winter. It was hard on me , because my cohorts on the outfit’s survey crew repeatedly kept falling ill, while I had to work over a month straight, as we had no days off and I never got bronchial ailments or the flu, despite smoking cigarettes back then.
He also misses the idea of treating chronic diseases without drugs, but with diet and nutrients, as well as exercise and activities. For example, megadose niacin is the best treatment at the moment for abnormal cholesterol, but there are no fortunes to be made from using it therapeutically- the reason there are so many useless cholesterol drugs is that pharmaceutical companies are much more interested in turning a profit than actually treating abnormal cholesterol properly. Big-time medicine is actually just a part of this battle for the bucks.
I suspect inflatable furniture would be the place to start.
A corollary to this is when shrinks find out if you’re using substances like vitamin B3 and/or mega-ascorbate. Then the shrink goes into contortions about how you’re destroying yourself with these venomous substances, maybe topping his lecture with symptoms of horror, as though you’re going to turn into a werewolf before his very eyes (before you tear him to pieces, of course).
One of the things that seem to be missing in these arguments is the effect of diet.
Let me use the example of the Turkish troops who were captured by the Chinese when Gen MacArthur let the Chinese overwhelm his overextended troops. Although our GI’s suffered miserably in Chinese prison camps, the Turks didn’t- being members of a peasant army in a poor society, they started their captivity by consuming all the edible weeds in their camps and saving their seeds (I don’t imagine that the rats in their camps lasted very long, either). Unlike our captive GI’s, they were still in decent shape when they were repatriated, as they’d supplemented their miserable Chinese diets with anything edible they could get their hands on.
Since I don’t use medications or see therapists, I get to watch MH professionals go into contortions if I get annoyed enough to tell them that (A.) I’m schizophrenic and that (B.) I don’t use meds at all, but take mega-nutrients and watch what I eat and drink while paying attention to whatever drugs I might be offered (no stimulants or alcohol, please). I think that sometimes they’re wondering if I might suddenly go on a rampage.
Just prior to my ongoing romance with orthomolecular medicine, I was involved with hallucinogenic drugs and substances, one early project being finding antidotes to deliria brought on by PCP/ketamine type drugs, which will leave you truly delirious if some ER type doc gives you an antipsychotic “antidote” as treatment ( I found that l-glutamine’s far better than these drugs, even though it’s never been considered an antipsychotic substance).
This is the sort of thing that happens when shrinks don’t explore the perceptual status of their patients, but rely on “diagnostic jive” to guide their prescribing, ignoring the simple reality that individuals with numerous perceptual distortions shouldn’t get stimulants, no matter what the DSM “diagnosis” states is proper.
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.