Anti-Psychiatry: What do you think of it?

Hayward, this may seem like a cop out answer, but only you can decide what is right for you.

Hi LL-
No, it doesn't seem like a cop out answer at all, and I know that you are right. I am just frustrated, and I was actually sort of trying to be funny...

I know I know... My husband always tells me that I should warn people ahead of time if I am trying to be funny, just so they will know.

Hayward, as lizardlady said, only you can make that decision. I think in a lot of cases meds are seen as a quick fix without a full treatment plan. Medication, for the most part, is useless without the added support of therapyu, behavioral modification and the likes. Medication only helps with symptoms but never take away the cause.

I've run into anti-psych people before
it really makes me mad

...and that's all I'm gonna say on this subject.

I'm not so sure that most people even know what what "Anti-psychiatry people" are Kaika.

What does seem important is that someone said they're bad so, without bothering to investigate or research, people go along with the pack -- mob psychology, mass psychosis.

That doesn't make me mad. It does, sometimes, create a feeling of deep sadness within me. And sometimes, it makes me want to turn my back on humanity and walk away from the people who would say that this is okay.

Meantime, I'm trying to rummage up some support for a young man who has been kept in the hospital for five years. He's not been offered psychological treatments, he's not been able to curl up next to his partner at night, he's had to carry out the vast majority of his relationship with his young son in a locked visitor's ward, his teeth are rotting due to his treatment with Thorazine and no one is addressing that, he can't control his bladder due to the medications, and the doctors won't let him out of the hospital because they say he just doesn't seem to have any ... motivation to live ... he's not getting any better and they say this is evidence that he is very, very sick.

His partner made a video about him. Before you watch it, I have to warn you, she's an anti-psychiatrist:

Would you be willing to sign his petition even though the psychiatrists who are treating him say they know what is best for him? Would you still be willing to do the same if that meant someone might call you an "anti-psychiatrist" too?

If your answer is yes, you can sign his petition here: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/free-john.html

While you're at it, you can take a look at this mother's plea. She's on a hunger strike, trying to get help for her son: http://www.mindfreedom.org/as/act/us...edium=facebook

Meantime... I'll have to reflect on your words and wonder if maybe you're right. Maybe, the people who say that the field of psychiatry isn't always right... maybe they're wrong.

[Those who might wish to know more about John can try here: http://www.politics.ie/health-social...ping-john.html ]

there are brain chemistry disorders, and there are chemicals which affect brain chemistry, and no one knows which will do what, until it's tried. doc's have all be thru medical school, which is essentially a brain washing cult, and they can only see out of one eye,, the Medical Model. if you want to be part of that,,, roll the dice~~~ best wishes,, Gus

I'm beginning to think that Einstein was correct: "You can't solve a problem with the same mind that created it".

Of course physicians come out of medical school employing the medical model and "evidence based medicine". It's what they were trained to do.
Clearly the mind, and the so-called disorders of it are a complex system of problems that medicine does not deal very well with. Medical research, with its over-reliance on statistical probabilties doesn't either. We simply do not have the mathematical or systems-based tools to apply what is essentially chaos theory to the system of the mind.

It also doesn't help that with almost any clinical trial of a new psychiatric medicine, that a 30% placebo effect almost invariably shows up.

Personally, I find the medications for bipolar disorder to be especially, well, just bad. Yet, I do think that some people are significantly helped with medication available.

However, in my opinion, all is not lost. One thing that has clearly surfaced in the just the last decade is an increasing awareness of mental health and an influx of monies, both from gov't and private sources, earmarked to understand it better. Genome wide studies are looking promising, but again, we do not have the mathematical tools to understand the complex interaction between multiple genes, each potentially contributing a small effect to the whole.

In reality, psychiatry is still in its infancy, and in a real way, we are its guinea pigs.

I think the placebo effect is well worth investing. You can get drunk on placebo. You can get better on placebe (it works for pain killers as well). Imagine... you could get better... on your own. Current psychiatry makes this thought impossible ("it's not in your head" = you cannot get better on your own, you damaged goods). We need to get back into giving people the power over their lifes.

In principle, I would agree with you, however, imbedded in that placebo effect, I suspect that there are people that actually respond to the drug in the experimental group. Further, the placebo effect is sometimes transient, yet, at present, there aren't the monies to continue the trials long enough to determine long term benefit that may be due to the drug.

Now clearly, there are concrete things that people can do to improve themselves (lifestyle changes etc...) but I would not be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.

some would still need traditional medicine... but many could be helped with killing (literally... damaged thyroid or diabetus is no joke) side effects of the drugs. But willpower does not create cash flow.

Now let's see -- do a double-blind study, with one medication the placebo, and the other -- another placebo?

I know you are joking, but I consider psychiatry soft science... and these are *female dog* to measure. Especially when results of the treatment are often self-reported.

There is an agenda here: that only the mental illnesses that you have defined as "serious" are worth paying attention (or money) to. Notice how you characterize others in demeaning terms...

And, characterizing the mission of the TAC as "assisted treatment" I think is a bit disingenuous too: some see it as "forced treatment". If you will not address respectfully the fears of those who see it that way, then suspicion of you will continue.

Payne, among the "schizophrenics" I've spoken with there has nearly always been a triggering event that precedes the collapse / fragmentation of their ego (one's sense of self-identity). Sometimes this may be recognized by those around them as a significant cause of stress or trauma whereas other times, it might not be. Whatever those events are however, they will be of great significance to the individual in crisis.

Out of respect for the many personal accounts I've heard -- accounts that did include physical or sexual abuse in childhood or adulthood -- I have to say that yes, I believe these life experiences play a role in psychotic episodes. For some reason, we accept that childhood abuse can cause severe disorders of the psyche such as "splitting" into multiple personalities or dissociated states but we are supposed to accept that schizophrenia/bipolar disorder can only be caused by one thing: an underlying biological factor that can be explained neurologically or genetically.

My belief that other factors can play a significant role is part of what places me in the "anti-psychiatry" camp however I'm not alone in my belief. Other psychiatrists who are also "anti-psychiatrists" (according to some), also believe the same...

That is not to suggest that all individuals who have experienced psychosis/schizophrenia came from abusive backgrounds. I've spoken with many people who also had loving parents. Meantime, other examples of stressors that have played a role in ego collapse / fragmentation include:

- The loss of a significant relationship.
- Failure to meet a self-imposed standard or goal.
- Discovering that a significant relationship was not as you had believed, i.e., your father is not your biological father; your wife has not been faithful to you.
- A significant loss of personal status, i.e., being fired from a job, being humiliated in a public context.

Additional actions that are associated with the onset of psychosis include sleep deprivation, drug use, trauma, spiritual practices such as meditation or contemplation, food sensitivities, Lyme disease, brain tumors, etc.

For years it has been believed that there are biological, psychological and sociological factors that contribute to mental distress. This made up the frame of the bio-psycho-social model but over the past few decades, that model has become the bio-bio-bio model and anyone who suggests otherwise is -- you guessed it -- an "Anti-Psychiatrist."

Hello, spiritual_emergency. Your contribution to this thread has been useful to me as a means of better understanding the issues. It is very disconcerting to me to read about what I perceive to be turf wars and exaltation of form (style) over substance.

Nonetheless, there are opposing viewpoints. This series of articles presents one:

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=168
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=169
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=170
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=171
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=172

In my ideal world, the pros and antis would sit down and agree upon methods to resolve their differences. We all would benefit if these antagonists were more a part of the solution than the problem.

I don't really think that in my case you can even be speaking of rehabilitation; my symptoms started so early that I seroiusly doubt that I would have ever been able to hold down the type of job I do now or have stayed in a relationship as long as I have been able to if it had not been for combine medications and therapy.

I have a friend who has severe asthma, and one of the things that is happening to him as the result of his medcations is that he is developing a very bad form of glaucoma and is in effect going blind. I more or less see myself in the same postion as he is in. It wasn't so much a question of quick answers and how do we pad the pocket of one of my father's fellow practitioners. It was how do we keep this kid alive long enough to find out what is happening? then it was how do we keep her alive long enough to get some weight on the bones? Until the therapy starts to take? Until the baby gets weaned? Then it was OH MY GOD YOU MEAN SHE WAS BIPOLAR????

You see, I was, and to an extent still am, on a minimum of what was considered desirable by practitioners in the field when it came to antidepressants, and later, stabilisers and/or antipsychotics; first, because of hereditary thyroid problems and kidney problems, (which, by the way, yes, if you use any pain killers, you HAVE to watch out for) and later, because I am willing to live with a certain amount of anxiety and/or instability because I know what it is. The problem was, the therapy was not working, and I was being blamed.

Right now, with all due respect, I readily understand why people might not want to go through all the medications that are marketed to handle schizophrenia (by the way, the study that you keep citing of healthy people who were diagnosed and institutionalized as schizophrenic was just that, a "study" done decades ago by journalistic students who arrived at the hospitals with, I believed, phony reocrds showing that they had histories of schizophrenia). These are heavy, nasty ammunition and unless the disease is worse (and mine is, ask my family, if you don't believe me) I would not recommend taking them.

But the language of the debate is so close to another aspect of both my "recovery" (of what to what?) and my life in general that I find that more than the actual subject matter rather triggering. it comes far too close to the times when I have had people walk up to me in church or in a prayer group and say I have no faith, that am a drug addict because I take medications. As a college student i was stupid enough to fall for that. See? It's all WILL POWER!

As I've mentiond before, neither the meds alone or the therapy alone have been able to get me where I am. I need the meds to stabilize, I need the therapy to 1. Keep my stress and symptoms managed and 2) help me manage my issues to keep my med use down. But I feel the warning bells going off with certain black/white tendancies that I see and hear going on in the discussion.

Lord knows, where there is money, greed and lies will follow, where there is power, blood will flow. This is true whether we are talking about big pharma or insurance, military complex or organic fertilizer. Critical thinking is OK, but perhaps it is a bit much tio say that everyone who studied traditional medicine is completely hoodwinked by all this? This is one last post before I follow quietly; sometimes I say what I should not. HUGGGS all, and Happy New Year.

I posted this link at least once before:

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/conte...c-542d5b198362

in which the then-president of the American Psychiatric Association used that phrase lamenting about the bio-psycho-social model becoming the bio-bio-bio model. So the psychiatric community is itself not monolithic, and one can find some discussion within it of alternatives.

I find these conversations distressing too, lonegael. Part of what distresses me is that, for example, in a number of conversations I've had with people over the past several months I have posted some links to a series of studies demonstrating the high rate of mortality among schizophrenics. Studies strongly suggest that this mortality rate is associated with anti-psychotic drug use. I've yet to have anyone respond with so much as, "Gee, that's a shame." People say nothing. Nothing.

I am not sure what to make of their complete lack of response. It feels like people don't care. It feels like no one gives a damn. Meantime, I've been working for months trying to drum up some support for John Hunt and it's like pulling teeth trying to get signatures. People don't care. I'm afraid that John will die in that hospital and everyone who's read about his plight knew that could happen but to actually make the effort of signing a petition? Apparently, that's too much effort to make on behalf of another human being.

I find it very discouraging. It does cause me to lose faith in the goodness of humanity. It does feel like no one cares if those people die because they didn't consider them worthy of living to start with.

Meantime...

lonegael: by the way, the study that you keep citing of healthy people who were diagnosed and institutionalized as schizophrenic was just that, a "study" done decades ago by journalistic students who arrived at the hospitals with, I believed, phony reocrds showing that they had histories of schizophrenia).

Just for the point of clarification -- they didn't have phony records. They arrived in the ER and reported hearing one of three words. That was enough to get them admitted. Once admitted, they reported they were no longer hearing anything and otherwise, reverted to their everyday behavior. In spite of this, once admitted, even their routine daily actions were interpreted as symptoms of mental illness and all of them were diagnosed as having a form of severe mental illness.

lonegael: As I've mentiond before, neither the meds alone or the therapy alone have been able to get me where I am. I need the meds to stabilize, I need the therapy to 1. Keep my stress and symptoms managed and 2) help me manage my issues to keep my med use down. But I feel the warning bells going off with certain black/white tendancies that I see and hear going on in the discussion.

I think you're right. People do get triggered whenever we talk about people who have made recoveries. I suspect this is because of their own internal dialogue and voices in the past, exactly as you describe. Many of the people I've met who make use of medications, deep down, feel like it does demonstrate some sort of deficiency within them. I can say to them, "There is no shame in using a tool you identify as helpful," but unless they fully believe that within themselves, they don't hear me. Instead, they hear that internal dialogue that whispers, maybe there is something wrong with them for being who they are, for getting the life they got, for making the choices they made.

Alternatively, some people -- particularly those who are dependent upon financial support -- can become very threatened by talk of recovery because they're afraid some government official will say, "Oh, well, it's been demonstrated that some people recover so you can recover too. We'll be taking that check back, thank you very much." I can understand their concerns because it's been such a hard battle to get financial support in the first place and it is necessary to their very survival. I've been told by more than one such person, they'd like me to shut up.

This is why, I, merely by existing, merely by having an experience I didn't orchestrate anymore than you orchestrated yours, am considered threatening to people. It's not like I said, "Okay, I need someone to traumatise me to the extent that it causes my sense of self-identity to implode and fragment. Then, I'm going to put myself back together all nice and tidy-like and really show those doctors a thing or two!" That's not the way it happened.

Nonetheless, some people find it tremendously discomforting to hear what I have to say. They'd prefer that I not talk about recovery, especially not recovery without medication. It triggers feelings in them that they should have done something more, or something less, or something different. I think that's where people need to really get to an okay place within themselves and fully accept that "their own way of doing things" is fine.

In an ideal world, there might be a machine we could plug into and it would take a reading that specifically told us: Your problem is 38% biochemical, 23% psychological and 39% environmental. Therefore, you need to take precisely this much medication, seek precisely this much therapy, and make precisely these changes to your environment.

We'd probably all get a different reading because we're all different people. No matter, we don't have those kind of diagnostic tools at our disposal -- besides, we're not cars, we're human beings. We all have different experiences, different options at our disposal, different responsibilities, different goals and dreams.

Meantime, what are we to say to the people who are struggling to get better, who are trying to craft the best recovery they're capable of? That it can't happen and if it does, they should be ashamed of themselves? What are we to say to the people who have been harmed by psychiatric practices? That they should take one for the team, call it 'collateral damage' and get over it? What about the people who have suffered abuse? Do we tell them it wasn't abuse, it was just a faulty collection of neurons and chemicals in their brain? What about the mother whose child died from neuroleptic malignant syndrome? What about people like Grainne who can't get her partner the help he needs because he is locked away and has no power to get out? What about people like Cindi Fisher who can't get her son out of the hospital and may not win her plea to become his legal guardian?

The answers are not easy, they're complex. And yes, they can stir up a lot of emotion that's difficult to sit with. My own experience tells me you need to let that come up, then, you sort through the pieces and find your own answers. Self-compassion can be a good companion during this process, but so, too, is knowledge.

~ Namaste

Thanks, pachyderm, for pulling out this APA address for us to see. I note that it was given in 2005. Would that the psychiatric world would listen.....I have to admit that I cringe when I even see pens, clocks, note pads, and other rather inexpensive items that docs are given by drug reps, much less think about the docs being wined and dined by these people.

I first asked early on in this thread what it meant to be "anti-psychiatrist," and I have certainly received a lot of enlightenment here. Thanks to everybody!

I still go back to the idea that drugs should be used to try to get people to the point where they are able to benefit from therapy. I can't say, then, that I perceive myself as "anti-psychiatrist," although I don't like the trend that the field has taken.

I myself have told people that "bipolar is like diabetes," even though I feel some discomfort when I say that. However, I see that it can be useful in trying to reduce the stigma that people who are mentally ill are "weak," "don't have enough faith," "are the victim of labeling," or whatever.

I will continue to take the least amount of drugs that I can and stay in psychotherapy. Meanwhile, I hope that more and more discoveries will be made about the causes of mental illness and better and better treatments will be created. And that the men and women who are psychiatrists will start listening to people such as a certain former president of the APA.

the Byzantine: Hello, spiritual_emergency. Your contribution to this thread has been useful to me as a means of better understanding the issues. It is very disconcerting to me to read about what I perceive to be turf wars and exaltation of form (style) over substance.

Byzantine, I consistently promote the work of two psychiatrists -- Loren Mosher and John Weir Perry -- and one clinical psychologist, Jaakko Seikkula. I promote their work because I think they offer superior methods of treatment to the medical model. In spite of this, I still get called "anti-psychiatry". If I was promoting pumpkins, I could understand why. But I'm not. Nonetheless, those links are there. For those who are reaching for their own best recovery from psychosis/schizophrenia... they can follow up on them.

Those programs were not modeled upon the socially acceptable paradigm so you can't find them for yourself or your child. People will need to do their research and unless they're fortunate enough to live in Lapland, they'll probably have to create those programs for themselves to the best of their ability. They might be able to find some professionals who are open to working with them but they will likely have to pay for them out of pocket. Psychotherapy is not covered by most insurance programs for people who have "broken brains".

Meantime, I've heard that, in America, there is now the equivalent of an Underground Railway for people like John. It's a shame he's in Ireland.

~ Namaste

Payne: I first asked early on in this thread what it meant to be "anti-psychiatrist," and I have certainly received a lot of enlightenment here.

As noted, I've been taking part in a similar conversation elsewhere and some of the comments made me wince. One of the problems was that some people were categorized as weak or stupid or supportive of Big Pharma's unethical tactics if they made use of medications. These sort of accusations hurt them because it invalidated their personal experience and efforts to move forward. The people who made those sort of comments get categorized as "Anti-Psychiatrists" although I think a more appropriate term might be "Insensitive".

The people I think of as "Anti-Psychiatrists" are the people who have the capacity to challenge our perspectives and perhaps, alter our views of what "mental illness" is and how, we, as a society should respond to it. You have to climb some ladders to get there. Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, Peter Breggin, David Healey... these are some examples of such people. They challenged the status quo, they shook things up, they made us look and prompted us to question what was going on. As a result, they helped to shape policy, treatment, laws.

Meantime, I have been hanging out with this...



I was not a very good schizophrenic and I'm not a very good Anti-Psychiatrist either because I can't get people to look and I can't change society's perspective.

There is no pill that exists that takes that kind of pain away and the fact that I can feel John's pain and Grainne's pain and the pain of so many others like them, this is what tells me I am well, that I am human. I am not so sure, at times, about everyone else.

John's story does terrify me. The last time I was hospitalized, I did NOT have good experiences with the pdocs there. One tried to insist, for example, that I go back on a low dose of a drug (Lamictal) that I had been taken off of for bad side effects. For one thing, I was hardly able to move! He said "then they would watch me to see what would happen." "How long will that take?" I asked. "I don't know," he responded. I had been on the drug for 9 years, the last 3 years at the highest therapeutic dosage!

They kept trying to push the drug on me. Even one morning the "medicine dispenser" just gave me my drugs as a handful. I noted that THE drug was in there and I took it out. "Oh, I forgot," he said. Right! I'm just glad it isn't available as a shot. At least the nurses were willing to tell me in personal conversations that I had the choice to refuse. One even was willing to agree with me that the pdoc was wrong!

Several of us patients believed that one patient was being overmedicated. Talk about the proverbial zombie! But what could we have done?

I have never been psychotic. I am Bipolar II. But what if I had been "officially" labeled as psychotic?! We have all seen the movies that show the patients in mental hospitals moving around like zombies.

That said, even as a person with Bipolar, I have been zombified at times on drugs. At one point I kept getting lost when trying to drive around, for example. I got lost one time on the way to a pdoc's office, after I had been there a good many times. He put me in the hospital to adjust my drugs. Later on I got lost on the way to another pdoc's office. He just charged me for missing my appointment. Several years ago, the pdoc I was seeing said I "was overmedicated." Well, whose fault was that? My memory is limited, and I now function at a fairly low level. I am now on disability. I have a Ph.D. in psychology, of all things, and was a college/university professor (with tenure) for years. Yes, I am angry! I even have trouble following threads sometimes.

I am on a fairly low level of meds right now, after being taken off almost everything. One drug I'm on is Tegretol. I do think it is negatively affecting my mental capacity.....But, what can I do?

Well, thanks for letting me vent. I guess I tell my story in part to point out that there are cases of less damage being done, but it still greatly impacts people's lives.

What IS the answer? Big Pharma is not motivated to come up with new drugs for Bipolar II. They just push the anti-psychotics and anti-epileptics used for other disorders. At what peril?

I do think people ought to be complaining and campaigning for mental patients. We are still being shafted, some more than others.

The task of persuasion is made more difficult by the implication those who disagree are less than human.

Byzantine. I don't need your chastisement. If I lack faith in the goodness of humanity, it's because I lack faith in the goodness of humanity.

I've spent months trying to help John and trying to convince people to invest 17 seconds of their precious time trying to help another human being. They're not going to take that time. And my fear, that he will die in that place, while people stand by and do nothing, is a valid one.

No, Byzantine. I don't have to feel good about humanity right now. My faith is spent.

Sometimes it's best just to agree to disagree........