Anti-Psychiatry: What do you think of it?

People who disagree are defiitely not less than human. IN all reality, those who choose to disagree are often more human because they have chosen to think for themselves dispite the pressure of people around them. To have a differeing opinion is nobel.

I just want to THANK everyone for this thread....

I may, or may not,
contribute later.
I have experiences that speak directly to this issue.
But, I do want to say one thing only.

Just because Big Phara says something...
IE, "It's a chemical imbalance."
And even though they say it over and over,
and others repeat the mantra,
so it *appears* to be the truth...
Well, that just does not *make* it the truth.

In fact, a pill does not correct everything.
Sometimes,
That pill is the very *cause* of a much *bigger* problem.

Peace!

Me too sunflower.

Thomas Szasz...

There you go. There's the big bad anti-psychiatrist, Szasz. He spoke for the schizophrenics. This may be a source of relief to those of you who are considered to have some other form of "mental illness" and were concerned that Szasz may have been minimizing your pain.

Meantime, I did come across the term drapetomania only recently. It was a bizarre form of mental illness characterized by "the unnatural desire of slaves to want to run away from their masters." Only black people got it.

At the point larger culture determined slavery was morally incomprehensible and it then became illegal to hold another human being in captivity (unless they're a psychiatric patient)... the slaves were magically cured of their "disease".

Anti-psychiatry show us the dark side of psychiatry. It's not pretty.

I know it may be an unpoular view bur i find that Szasz has many valid points when it comes to mental illness, and not just schizophrenia.

Byzantine: The task of persuasion...

What is it I should be attempting to persuade people to see Byzantine --John's humanity? The injustice of his treatment? The manner in which he has been harmed? If I have to persuade other people to see that then I think my lack of faith in other human beings, particularly those who have called themselves his professional caregivers, is well justified. Meantime, if anyone is willing to switch places with him, let me know and I'll see what I can do. Surely, it's someone else's turn to be locked away and abandoned. If "you" can live through that for five years and come out of it with your mind and soul intact, tell us how.

Dark_Dreams: i find that Szasz has many valid points when it comes to mental illness...

I feel reasonably confident that if we were to poll the 974 people who have read this thread, 97% of them would be willing to agree that Drapetomania was not a real disease.

Likewise, a lot of people would probably share the opinion that masturbation doesn't make you blind or insane; that homosexuality is not a disorder; that speaking out against your government or your husband is not an illness. However, all of these have been considered forms of "mental illness" in the past.

Some of you may say, "Yes, but that was then and this is now! We don't do that anymore!" I would ask, are you sure? How do you feel about toddlers being diagnosed with bipolar disorder? What about infants on anti-psychotic medication? What about the rate of ADHD in boys? Or the disproportionate number of African-Americans in jail? We are still a society prone to bias, prejudice, discrimination, assumption and subjective reasoning. Lacking a reliable diagnostic tool, the determination of what is a "mental illness" and what is not is fueled by opinion, both informed and not-so-informed.

Does that mean that your pain isn't real? No, but Szasz never said that human suffering wasn't real. He simply said, "Demonstrate the disease process."

Much earlier in this conversation someone stated that science believes it will soon be able to show that all forms of mental illness can be demonstrated on a biological scale. Given that we are all human, I would hope so. By the same token, we can probably present a biological profile of love, joy, an orgasm, sadness, despair, anguish, terror. Our neurochemical profile probably alters hundreds of times in any given day. Just because we can correlate a neurochemical response to a life experience that doesn't mean a disease process is in place.

My area of experience and knowledge is related to schizophrenia and psychosis -- not depression, not autism, not OCD or DID. I can't claim to have an intimate understanding of how those processes work but I do know that in spite of schizophrenia being presented as a disease, it does not behave like one in all people. If it did, no one should ever be able to recover from it without treatment and we have evidence from all around the world that they do. That means we're either not very good at figuring out who is psychotic/schizophrenic and who is not or we're wrong.

Whether or not those kind of results are transferable to other forms of psychological or mental distress... I'll leave it for those with depression, autism, OCD, etc. to find those answers for themselves.

See also: Soul In Crisis: Why Cultural Healing Must Replace the 'Mental Illness' Fiction [PDF File]

Several have mentioned the damaging side-effects of medication and there are people who say meds cause mental illness. There are many studies of schizophrenia in people who have never been treated with a medication. I thought these studies might give some food for thought.

Because I am a new member, I am not able to post links but if you put "individuals never treated" at the Treatment Advocacy Center web site, you will come up with the studies.
Namaste

Here is a link to a lecture that some might consider anti-psychiatry but I think it is a very informative analysis of the current state of affairs. I think it speaks to what Byz talked about when he hoped the pros and anti's would work together to make things better going forward.

Mr. Witaker is not anti-medication but he wants to see a change in how determinations are made and treatment delivered. He is also a strong advocate for psycho social approaches with community support being a critical component to treatment.

I hope some of you will take the time to listen. I think it is very important to be informed and willing to be part of the discussion that needs to take place to improve the rates of recovery and remission for people faced with a mental illness. I also think some of the research he references is alarming enough that any of us using meds should hear so we at least know the potential long term risks.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/293935-1

Thanks for that, sanityseeker. Mr. Whitaker's book was both disturbing and eye-opening. From his website...

There are many details in Mr. Whitaker's book that are disturbing but one of the many factors that concerned me greatest was the rate of "mental illness" being diagnosed among our youth. Mr. Whitaker reports:


See also: Psychiatric Drugging Of Infants And Toddlers In The US - Part I

Yes... I too found the research around children very distressing.

None of this research on children is at all surprising to me. I myself have conducted research on this same subject and came to similar conclusions. Where this report stopped is making an effort to find the cause.

In tha state of California, the number of students being diagnosed with ADHD has increased every year since no child left behind and the introduction of standardized tests. Students are expected to perform at a much greater level, often times without the support necessary to do so. Also, with the increased pressure on students and teachers, it is essential that the distraction within the classroom be minimized. If a student is acting in a way which is seen as imappropriate, it is important to change that behavior and the easist way to do that is through medication. In addition, students who have a diagnosed disorder can be tested under different standards as other students which in turn can benefit the entire school. Schools with a certain number of English Language Learners and Special Education students, are not expected to show the same growth as other schools and will receive their funding based on a completely different set on standards.

It is also important to note that 30 years ago, most children left their house in the morning and wouldn't be back home until the street lights came on. Kids would go to a friends house for lunch and were free to play without interference. Since then, technology has children spending far more time in front of a television, video games or computers. Children often times today have 2 working parents which keep children in day care sometimes with little physical activity. These children then go home, work on homework, eat dinner, then get ready for bed so they can start all over the next day. It is also important to remember that the fear of preditors encourage parents to keep children indoors for their own safety. 30 years ago children got on average 4-6 hours of physical activity daily with more activity on weekends and during school breaks. Today, it is rare for a child to get even 2 hours especially with schools cutting physical education programs. Schools will also force students to miss recess if they are not performing at a certain level so they can get extra help.

Is it any wonder that children are restless in the classroom?

Children were also, at one time, allowed to learn in ways that were more beneficial for them. Not all children learn the same way. These same children were also encouraged to think and be creative. More and more children are being asked to fit into a particular box and therefore, when they do not, are considered "abnormal" and "mentally defficient"

Parents, teachers, dr's and the pharm industry are all too blame for this disaster. In addition, parents (not all) are to blame for not taking responsibility for their childs behavior and education. Yes school is there to educate but parents are meant to help support that education in the home. In addition, parents are expected to set certain standards for their child's behavior and support the standards of behavior created by the school. Many parents have decided that the school is responsible for all these things and they do not have any responsibility beyond that. After all, parents work full time jobs and cannot be bothered to help when the school should be doing the teaching.

Many people are to blame for the massive increase in medicating children.

ADHD diagnosis have increased on average 4% anually for the past decade. Between 1999-2000, there was a 500% increased in the domestic sales of medications for mental health. in 1991, there were 2 major manufactures providing on average 1760 kilograms which increased to 6 manufacturers and 15,000 kilograms by 2000. The United States consumes 85% of the worlds production of these medications. ADHD medication alone went from 1.3 million prescriptions in 1991 to 6 million in 2000.

Medicating is easy. It requires little effort or lifestyle changes. However, dietary and lifestyle changes require a great deal of work and would require people to give up something. Of course in America, instant gratification is the key. Also, Americans feel a sense of entitlement which must be fed regardless of who gets hurt.

None of the information about drugged children is news to many people. Even the causes you pointed to Dark Dreams are recognized by most people at some level of awareness. There are lots of stories in the media about it and yet it continues. Like you say Dark Dreams it is easier. It is hard to fight.

It was when my son was in elementary school (he is 17 now) that I became aware of how epidemic the drugging of children was getting. My nephew who attended the same school was forced by the school to get on Ridilan (sp?). His mother and I tried to fight it but she was told he would have to leave the school if she didn't comply. No question the boy was a challenge behaviourally but as you stated much of that was dietary and parenting related. His mother represents a lot of parents of kids like him who have limited life and parenting skills to do better for their children from the start.

When I realized just how many kids were being forced by the schools onto meds I went to the school board but at the end of the day they don't see another way and defer the decisions to the individual schools. They seemed blind to the writing on the walls or otherwise dumbfounded to find an alternative.

I went from there to a community services agency and through them I helped to develop and secure funding for a parenting programs. Initially we targetting behaviourally challenged children but it was open to anyone. We recruited a couple of community doctors, early childhood development specialists and a nutritionist. We even had teachers come in. We set up peer support groups, cooking class, lifeskills, child development and parenting workshops. We set up children's play groups and family gatherings. All with an aim to equip parents with the tools to put thier children on a healthy track and to socialize children. Some of the children in the program were on medications when they came into the program and were able to get off the meds as a result of their parent's applied learning and the children's social interactions in non school settings.

I think its these kinds of community based programs and services taken to a much broader scale that can help to turn things around. We need to bring forward some of those quality of life experiences you mentioned that was the norm for children 30 years ago when children were more active, more social, more likely to come from a 2 parent home with close extended family relationships, less likely to be unruly. We can't go back but we can bring forward the values and benefits and reframe them into a contemporary model. We can value these experiences enough to re-invent them in a way that can address real needs and interests.

Funding for these kinds of community based programs is harder and harder to secure from either public or private sources. Often funding is year to year with very little multi-year funding opportunities made available. Add to that the administrative demands to always be chasing money, lobbying for support and satisfying reporting requirements and a good chuck of money is spent off the top. Volunteerism is a key component but volunteers can't do it alone. Self sufficiency may be a goal in an ideal world but given where we are and how far we need to go to build that kind of community engagement and social responsibility its a much longer term goal. Public money and political will needs to provide the foundation and they are failing miserably.

People may know what the issues are but the will to turn it around is lacking. If we could blame ignorance that would be one thing, but we can't. People are informed. We know all the data. We know all the causes but we don't seem to be willing to take action. Again it is easier to ignore the evidence and buy in to the myths. Short term gain with no thought of long term pain. Our basic social construct is mentally ill. In response we all live 'in the moment' just to hang on to what sanity we have left. We are all under so much stress we can't see past the moment of time we are surviving.

These are chaotic times. There are so many challenges, so much demand for action, so many causes, demands for change that people are overwhelmed. Its too much. Everything just starts to blur together and people become numb to it all. We just wake up everyday, survive until we go to bed and repeat it all the next day.

I have some traits of ADHD. I am glad back in the 1990s pharma didn't rule my country... it was still hard to get through the school for me... teachers HATED me because I was not sitting quietly (I mean,I was quiet... I was drawing and staring out of window). I still made it to a good private High school where nobody cared anymore (and we were bunch of ADHD dyslectics and dysgraphics who despite all this could learn foreign language). I managed to get a college degree. (and yes, I am terribly terribly disorganized, my notes are mess...


Also, Americans feel a sense of entitlement which must be fed regardless of who gets hurt.

Most definitelly. They want easy ride. They aren't taught to live with their education... instead they are bombarded with commercials for pills for being sad.

And imho, depression too is somehow a luxury (even Susana Kaysen says something along those lines). If ones life depends on it they cannot afford to wallow in their own misery...

My sister has ADHD, was medicated a time until she herself stopped taking the medications and then did fine. Does she still have some characteristics, yes. But she mamges without the medicines probably as well as she would with them from what II have seen from other adults with ADHD I have seen.

As most know, I have BPD, probably always have, whaich shares a lot of characteristics with ADHD, espeically in children. I have had teachers try to bully my parents into having me medicated. It would have been a disaster, seeing how I react to stimulants. Even sipping my father's coffee would send me up the walls, and children's decongestants made me raging high! I still have to be very carefull about what I eat and drink when it comes to stimulants. But the teachers wanted me manageable and wanted it done yesterday and corporal punishment didn't work...

When I evaluate children for ADHD, there are children who ger a great deal of support from the schools and the parents in restructuring their environments, reworking their homework, getting cues in clastime so they know when they are starting to slide, and so on. We spent a lot of time trying to help the schools get a system for connecting with the kids, the parents and the specialists they needed so that especially in the early years, the kids learn as much coping as they could, and the schools can keep them up with their peers and they could avoid being stigmatised. These are the kids we can hopefully keep off the meds.

However, we have schools who deliberately trigger the children to have them removed, will declare every adjustment and accomodation impossible, and bully the parent to demand medication. We had schools where the parents had to threaten court action. We also had children who were so severely affected that medication was finally put in because theysimply could not make sense of their world. It was moving too fast.

A common problem is that the classrooms in Sweden are very unstructured with a great deal of work being unstructured and the responsibility for finishing the "projects" is left up to the child. there are few regular checks on the progress of work, and the age that this type of work is expected of the child is moved further and further back until we have seven year olds expected to do "research projects" without supervision. They sit in groups, there is a lot of distracting decoration in the classroom, and most of the time, they are sitting so they have to twist to see the teacher. There is always noise, always people getting up and moving around, and always people coming and going in the classroom.

I suspect that we are getting a lot of kids who with more structure were able to make it, simply not being able to concentrate in the class environment at all. I couldn't! It was hard enough in our classrooms thirty odd years ago! Some of these kids come home and collapse literally inside the front door crying, they are so exhausted from trying to handle everything all day. Then add all the stuff mentioned by sanityseeker above! Poor kids!

My son has some version of ADD, the professionals think. He has been prescribed vynase, and we also have him in therapy to see about helping him develop coping skills. I've also read all about it. He has the "quiet" kind, so the schools never complained, and he wasn't diagnosed until he was 17 (last year.) I have mixed feelings about the drug, but we are trying all approaches.

I fought being put on an anti-depressant years ago. I tried St. John's Wort, but it didn't seem to help. I believe in medicine for ailments, but I'm not one to run to the doctor and be all upset if I don't get a prescription every time. My former primary care doc seemed to give them out left and right.....

I am trying to learn all I can about psychiatry. As I mentioned earlier, I have decided I'm not a strong "anti-psychiatry" person, but I do think the field is getting off track. I bought "Toxic Psychiatry" by Breggin and "De mystifying Psychiatry" by Zorumski and Rubin yesterday. I am hopeful, as are the authors of the latter book, that psychiatry will be having some breakthroughs soon.

I haven't checked out all the resources that people have posted on this thread yet, but, again, I am thankful to everybody who has been contributing. It is a topic that hits us all where we live.

I'm antipsychiatry to the extent that it does not meet normal standards of medicine and has failed to do so since it's inception. What's more, psychiatrists seem to be hardly bothered by the fact that their diagnoses are no more than opinions.

Nor are they bothered by the fact that people with serious mental disorders, as a whole, do remarkably poorly in life in western countries where they are expected to be medicated.

A simple google search shows that many end up in jails or prisons, homeless, and/or drug addicted, unemployed, isolated and with a whole host of comorbid physical illnesses that render their life expectancy to be decades less than those without a diagnosis.

I could talk about my personal experience with psychiatry, which I experienced as brutality... I was beaten in psych wards in my supposedly civilized country. I was not treated for pain... that was just taken as a symptom of my mental disorder. I could go on.

But the point is not about me or any one person. I am sure there are some people who were helped by psychiatry but on the whole most people go into an endless downhill spiral once psychiatrists get their hands on them. They become permanent patients who take ever increasing amounts of drugs until they expire.

I am talking about people with what are called 'chronic mental illnesses', which is just another indication of the abject failure of psychiatry. Even cancer has treatment and cures in some cases, but when has psychiatry cured anything?

In my opinion, psychiatrists are not interested in cures. They are interested in power and control and job security.

Thinking of work ethic, determination, and commitment any medical doctor's degree especially psychiatry isbworth it's weight in gold, so to speak. Think of a television meteorologist reporting the weather. The work (psychiatry) is hard and when successfully accomplished it can change the world for the better. Anti-psychiatry? No. I think not. It ain't perfect but then few things are.

Well balanced.

I don't have any faith in the ones that I've seen.

First at hospital- refers me to someone else, but starts me on medication.

Second:Appointments less than 30 mins. Lets me leave with four months worth of medication. Attitude just medication. If it doesn't work we'll try a higher dose despite me telling her it made me worse.I was the most suicidal after starting trazadone.

Third: Nice-diagnosis= Major depressive disorder but I later learn that I have BPD .Says he never would have started me on the medication no.1 did. Spends an hour and 20 mins with me as he was a private doctor. Suggests Zoloft. I was desperate I guess- the medication just made me very sick so I stopped after 2 months.

I've been in the "system" more than 40 years. I've gone from having a therapist for one on ones and groups and a shrink for meds to no group no therapist only a shrink to just having annual medical check ups after my shrink passed away. My shrink was like a best friend or something, offering me different meds for my diagnosis but not really insisting that I take them. We were searching for something that worked for me. I must have tried a million prescriptions. There's always a new med just around the corner and we were trying the latest and the best of 'em. They all seem to have the same effect though. It was no therapist, no group leaders, just a shrink to talk to with pills for me to try and see if they helped. I really believed that I might find a pill that would work for me. Oops! I forgot where I was taking this . . . .

Wiliam Styron from the original post was my teacher, and the catastrophe of his massive depression was on the extreme end of human experience, and he was also a searcher for meaning and language to express it. His magic was in looking inward, and not outward at the industry/ profession surrounding mental health.

I'm finding it's also financial. I'm having trouble finding ANY mental health professionals who will take insurance. The last dr I saw charged $375 for the first visit and $265 for subsequent visits. I had to pay out of pocket. My ins co reimbursed me $26. The dr before that who did take insurance had me so overmedicated that I couldn't function. I've given up on them.

Dislike Szasz who really had the wrong approach, but RD Laing was always a big influence on me and way ahead of his time, many of his ideas are now being vindicated

I recently have taken a moment to briefly review Anti-psychiatry. The movement has been around for at least 200 years. That's about two thirds the time Bellevue Hospital has reigned supreme here in America. Psychiatry like all else is evolutionary with flaws and pitfalls. Advocacy groups for a great percentage of diagnosed clents police it. Beginning withFranz Mezmer, the treatment of people with so called mental health issues does not always boast of human or ethical conduct towards its subjects. The advocacy provided in the philosophy, considerations, and beliefs of the anti-psychiatry movement is both needed and necessary for possibly all of the reasons and objections given since its beginning. It appears beneficial to both psychiatrist and client.

tbh I don't think there is a single 'Anti-psychiatry' movement and there is really very little if anything in common between the likes of Szasz and therapists like Laing, or for that matter those earlier advocates for moral treatment and more ethical and user centred mental health practice. I don't really think they should be lumped together.