More Or Less Biology In Psychiatry–That Is The Question

Much newsprint has been wasted recently on the split between the APA (American Psychiatric Association) and the NIMH over the revision of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)  that is going to be called the DSM-5. In my view, letting the 100,000 manuals bloom is not going to be any better of a solution than letting the 100,000 diagnoses bloom in the long run. If we are going to treat every patient as an individual, for the sake of the individuality of his or her condition (and genetic makeup), that’s going to make for a whole lot of variation in disorder (and/or order) expression.

The New York Times covers the story, regarding the NIMH APA divide, in a story with the heading, Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out Of Touch With Science, Experts Say. Of course, it always depends on which experts you ask. The experts the mass media is still slow to consult, and the New York Times is no exception in this regard, are those experts with lived experience on the receiving end of mental health treatment.

While typically critics of the DSM have tackled the subject from one side of the political psychiatric spectrum, here comes mob boss Thomas Insel, godfather of the NIMH, attacking from the other. In the first instance, you have people who object to the biology in biological psychiatric theory, (Theory, now there’s as important a word as any.) in the second, you have a group that doesn’t think the APA is biologically grounded enough.

The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

The DSM focuses on symptoms precisely because we don’t know the causes. Dr. Thomas R. Insel, apparently, thinks otherwise.

Precision seems to be a big part of the problem. In psychiatric diagnosis, theoretical speculations aside, there are no precision tools.

The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”

Or, a possibility not considered here, we’ve got five misdiagnoses floating around for which there was no underlying condition in the first place.

Solution. The NIMH is developing it’s own manual, Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC.

About two years ago, to spur a move in that direction, Dr. Insel started a federal project called Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC, which he highlighted in a blog post last week. Dr. Insel said in the blog that the National Institute of Mental Health would be “reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories” because “patients with mental disorders deserve better.” His commentary has created ripples throughout the mental health community.

Consider, ripples sent throughout the mental health community, ripple throughout the “mental illness” community (i.e. the mental health ghetto). Now whether “patients with mental disorders” are going to get “better” treatment thereby is a big leap. Too big a leap in fact to make. So sorry, my poor victims of standard psychiatric malpractice!

Whatever you call it, my guess is that this switch still represents a way of billing insurance companies, the most important role for patient consumers a psychiatrist assumes. Of course, given that this paradigm change is all about biological explanations, I expect the treatment the insurance companies will be paying for is a chemical fix. Given this situation, the extent to which pharmaceuticals damage patients is still the great unasked question biological psychiatrists do their best to avoid asking.

The Evolution Revolution

Forced treatment is the big secret in the mental health “care” world today. Once upon a time, not that long ago, there was only one form of mental health treatment available, and that was it.

The American Psychiatric Association in fact grew out of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutes for the Insane. Where once you had the heads of what were then called Lunatic Asylums, now you have an association of professional pill pushers.

The big lie is that the pills they are pushing, and whose usage they are promulgating, are good for people, and not people in general, but specific people. People diagnosed with a “mental disorder”. This diagnosis is thought to make the people who have been given one somehow different from the general run of humanity and, therefore, in need of the fix that comes with a drug.

The truth is that mental health treatment is about social control. We have this law that permits confinement of anybody acting oddly on the grounds that they may cause harm to themselves or others. It would be a serious mistake, albeit a common one, to assume that people are held in psychiatric institutions because they are dangerous.

People in mental hospitals are not there because they were given a trial by jury. Usually they are there because they were given a hearing by judge, attorney, and psychiatrist in which judicial opinion subordinates itself to the whims of professional bias and procedural habit. Mental health commitment hearings, in other words, in the present day and age, are little more than kangaroo courts.

Drugs can’t fix people. Drugs can damage people. Drugs can’t straighten out faulty logic. Education can teach logical deduction. Drugs can’t supply insight. Drugs generally mask a problem rather than correct it. Masking a problem is not dealing with it, and coming  up with a solution to it.

Waiving independence in order to be treated by the mental health authorities, usually as a charity case, is not the best course of action to take as a rule. Doing so often involves forfeiting rights we think of as basic to our species. This revelation may take time to register and resonate, but it should come in time.

Yes, Virginia, there is life beyond the confines of the Mental Health clinic. One is not bound to the human services system the way a rat can be restricted to its track through a maze.  The thing is that that system shares many similarities with a rat maze. If it didn’t, researchers wouldn’t be studying rats with the idea of better understanding human behavior. I would strongly suggest that if success in the world is at all important to you, you should abandon the maze.

The irony found in the heading of this post comes with the realization that more complex organisms evolved from less complex organisms. The butterfly in a display frame is not a butterfly in flight. Our capacity expands to the extent that we learn to escape those boxes that other people would try to contain us within. Quite apart from biological limitations, and barring extreme circumstances, we have minds that allow us this advance and that departure.

Civil Rights Under Seige

If you thought former President George W. Bush, who wanted to screen every man, woman, and child of us for “mental illness” was bad, President Barack O’bama has climbed onto the same band wagon. President Obama essentially wants to turn our entire public education system into a mental health police state.

According to a report in the Bangor Daily News on the subject, White House wants $235 million for mental health programs.

President Barack Obama’s budget proposal will include $235 million in funding for new mental health programs focused on initiatives to help schools detect early warning signs and train thousands of new mental health professionals, an administration official said.

Alright that sounds benign enough, but just keep reading.

The new budget plan will propose $130 million for programs that train teachers and other adults to help recognize the early signs of mental illness in students. That includes $55 million for a new program called Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), which will give states and local school districts grants to administer such programs, while also collecting data on how well they work.

I’ve got nothing against ‘wellness’ nor ‘resilience’, I just have many reservations about whether that’s what we’re going to get out of these programs or not. On the other hand, training people to recognize signs of “mental illness” can be very questionable, especially when one of those early signs is being under the age of 18.

Another $50 million would go toward training master’s-level mental health specialists, such as psychologists, nurses and counselors, who work in schools. The idea is to expand the mental health workforce to prepare for the demands of millions of Americans who will gain health insurance coverage next year under the Affordable Care Act.

The “mental illness” labeling rate has been skyrocketing for years. Imagine the present “mental illness” labeling rate. Imagine that rate going up even further. It’s got to be extremely difficult to sell insurance plans, treatment options, and anti-”stigma” campaigns, without also selling the “diseases” that go along with them.

The consequences of this “mental illness” selling platform doesn’t concern the President very much as, following the Newton Connecticut tragedy, making scapegoats of people in the mental health system rather than achieving any real gun control legislation is one way for him to give the appearance that he’s doing something about the problem of gunmen in schoolyards. I’m afraid it is going to be causative in so far as increased “mental illness” labeling is concerned, and I’m also afraid that it’s not going to be preventative when it comes to massive acts of violence.

Sooner or later, later apparently, it’s going to come around to acknowledging that these citizens who have had their citizenship rights taken away from them are still citizens. Then comes the revelation, now that we’ve got two unequal castes of citizens, how do we refer to them? Dividing people into sick and well no longer works as what we’ve actually got is a legal distinction rather than a medical one. Sick people get well. Lower class citizens get lower wages, if they get wages at all, substandard living conditions, and the distinction of being deprived of their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Advocating For Human Rights and Against Mistreatment

I am not a mental health advocate. I have absolutely no interest in contributing to the current treatment crisis we’ve got going in this country. First, you’ve got the people doing the treatment. They call themselves mental health advocates. Then you’ve got the people they treat. Some of them call themselves mental health advocates, too. This breaks down into two groups of people, professionals or providers and patients or consumers. The providers are the people selling the treatment, and the consumers are the people buying the treatment.

You can’t sell the treatment without someone to sell the treatment to, and so, therefore, the providers must become sellers of the idea of consumption, or need. The mental health provider in essence is a seller of “mental illness”. Thus, if we read mental health advocacy as the advocating of mental health treatment, there is an unstated conflict of interest involved here. Your advocates must also be advocates of “mental illness” in order to have a large stock of people to treat.

If 1 in 5 people in the USA are consumers buying mental health treatment, people described as “mentally ill”, 4 in 5 people in the USA are not consuming mental health treatment. Problem. 1 in 5 is in danger of becoming 2 in 5 which could then become 3 in 5, etc. Then there’s the matter of how much of the population, given this increase, would need to be mental health workers, that is, providers. In that eventuality, given a nation in which the majority of the people within that nation are mental health consumers, perhaps we should add to an M to USA. This would make us the United Medical States of America.

Back to the statistic that presently applies. 4 in 5 people in the nation are not consuming mental health at this time. If we take mental health to mean mental health treatment,  4 in 5 people in this country have no need for mental health. Nobody has turned this statistic around to ask, well, how many people in the 20 % that we’re saying consume mental health treatment don’t really need to consume mental health treatment. This isn’t the kind of question people who advocate for mental health treatment ask. They don’t want fewer people in treatment, they want more. There is only one direction to go in for them, and that direction is upward in so far as numbers are concerned.

Should anyone have any hesitations about seeking treatment, these mental health advocates have this word “stigma” that they throw out with such abandon. Funny thing about “stigma”, the people selling this idea of “stigma” aren’t talking about how much of the treatment they are referring is unwanted treatment. There was a time, not that long ago, when the only mental health treatment people received was forced mental health treatment. So long as there are people being treated against their will and wishes, this lie about “stigma” is only a ruse. People aren’t reluctant to go into treatment because of any “stigma”, people are reluctant go into treatment because treatment always results in prejudice and discrimination.

As I stated, I am not a mental health advocate. I am not a mental health advocate because I am a human rights advocate. I am opposed to forced mental health treatment on principle. Forced mental health treatment doesn’t take place without violating a person’s rights as a citizen and a human being. You can’t force treatment on a person without taking away that person’s liberty. I have nothing against treating people who want to be treated. I simply think all mental health treatment should be voluntary treatment.

This opposition to force means that I believe people should not be imprisoned, tortured, and poisoned in prisons called hospitals in the name of mental health. Doing so doesn’t result in good outcomes as a rule. Not only are the results poor, but you can only do so by violating the basic rights of the individuals being so mistreated. There are other ways of treating human beings. I advocate using some of those other ways.

Developing a motto

Don’t go to the psychiatrist! Those five words are on their way to becoming my motto. Psychiatrists no longer do psychoanalysis. No, analysis is now counseling, and in the domain of psychologists and social workers. Psychiatrists work for insurance payments, and to get paid, they dole out psychiatric labels. Once a psychiatric label has been attached to the patient, they’re ready to get down to business, the real task of the psychiatrist, that of pill pusher. Psychiatrists these days are pitchmen and puppets of the pharmaceutical industry. Even most psychiatrists giving lip service to the mostly defunct practice of talk therapy have been transformed into de facto drug lords.

Now that talk therapy has taken a nose-dive and crash landed, pills are the panacea of psychiatry. Unfortunately, we’re talking about pills that mostly mean ‘bad medicine’ any way you cut it. You’ve got doctors, indirectly or directly, in the employ of unscrupulous profiteers who will stop at nothing to get and keep their product on the market. Chemical compounds are the new gold and, as such, research and development has spawned a new gold rush. You’ve also got them selling drugs that are essentially unhealthy as if they were the world’s answer to “ill” health. The result of all this unscrupulous wheeling and dealing is a population of people maintained on psycho-active brain-impairing substances whose “sickness” is actually their dependence on this ill-health-ware system.

Systemic and chemical dependence, in my book, is not well-fare. A government maintaining a population of state subsidized artificially manufactured “invalids” or, better, “in-valids”, is not my idea of a government managing a healthy economy. The news from the treatment front has not been good. People going through treatment for the most severe diagnostic labels are getting, of all things, worse. They are getting worse because of, rather than in spite of, the pills they are maintained on. The business is booming then of destroying the patient. This business wouldn’t be booming if you didn’t have a ready supply of suckers to succeed your growing casualty list. A list that is all too readily passed over and pitched into the waste basket.

There is no ‘three strikes you’re out’ law when it comes to pill pushing psychiatrists. These guys and gals have been getting away with murder since the development of this not such a wonder drug and that. Of course, should a psychiatrist blatantly step over certain bounds of reasonable self-restraint and discretion in prescribing practices, he or she can have his or her license to practice medicine taken away from him or her by the courts. As the medicine they practice is not really medicine at all but toxic drug pushing, this penalty can come none too soon when it can come at all. Were we to prosecute intransigent psychiatrists for the damage that they did cause, psychiatrists would be much more reluctant to poison people through chemistry.

I will admit that there are exceptions to the drug peddling psychiatrist rule. I will also admit that those exceptions are few and far between. This scarcity of health minded psychiatrists makes the profession as a whole more of a liability than an asset to the human race. If there is any important work to be performed in the mental health profession today, it can be done by people without a degree in psychiatry. Unfortunately, most of those other mental health workers tend to be underlings to psychiatrists. This makes the entire profession of mental health treatment subject to corruption of the worst sort across the board. The health of the patient has become the last concern of a mental health profession hung up on procedural matters.

There is little to no so called “mental illness” in the animal kingdom. What “mental illness” you do have in the animal kingdom is usually a matter of developing the laboratory specimens with which to devise new treatments for human beings. As with animals, there was much less “mental illness” in antiquity than there is today. The more primitive your culture gets, the less inclined it is to label its deviant members “mentally ill”. I’m for this more basic bare bones approach to the problem. When life is a matter of hunting and gathering, personal problems don’t prevent people from doing their part. I think the cave man or woman who figured he or she was born with the chemistry he or she needed had it right all along.  I personally feel that the damage perpetrated by the field of psychiatry is so devastating that it is a profession we should oppose at every turn.

Harmful Psychiatric Drug Use Highest In Southern States

The magazine is Health, and the article screams out, Psychiatric Drugs More Often Prescribed in the South.

Living in a southern state, and knowing what this part of the country is like, this somewhat disturbing finding is not all that surprising to me.

Although people living in the West are the least likely to use antipsychotics, antidepressants and stimulants, the Yale researchers found that the drugs’ use is 40 percent higher in a large section of the South than in other parts of the country. The study authors attributed this discrepancy to variations in local access to health care and marketing efforts within the pharmaceutical industry.

Uh, right. If you were wondering about the source of this statistical data, this is what the study results from a new Yale survey indicate.

The study, which included data on 60 percent of the prescriptions written in the United States in 2008, revealed that patients living in sections of the South were 77 percent more likely to fill a prescription for a stimulant. Southerners also were 46 percent more likely to fill a prescription for an antidepressant and 42 percent more likely to do so for an antipsychotic.

Let me add that it was a little encouraging to think that in other parts of the nation people know better.

…16 % of Cape Cod, Mass. residents on stimulants…national average at 2.6 %…

Meanwhile, about 40 percent of residents of Alexandria, Va., took antidepressants. In contrast, roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population used these drugs. Antipsychotics were most commonly used in Gainesville, Fla., where 4.6 percent of local residents took the drugs, compared with a national average of 0.8 percent.

 Emphasis added.

Whoa! 40 % is 2/5ths, and that is approaching 1/2. What a coup for some drug company mogul, and if you think about it, the market isn’t nearly saturated if you can have that level of use in one single locality. I’m not a drug company mogul though, and I think the 10 % national average outrageously excessive.

Obviously, residing in Gainesville Florida, if it’s a matter of the greatest need I guess I’ve come to the right place. How do I explain this high level of neuroleptic use? Easy, four letters, NAMI, acronym for the National Alliance for Mental Illness. This organization, founded by relatives of people labeled “mentally ill”, the very people most often responsible for sending their kinfolk to the Loony Bin, with its conflicts of interest, and its misinformation campaigns, is deeply entrenched in this state, and in this town. If you ever have the misfortune of visiting the NAMI Florida website you will see that the organization is sponsored, for one thing, by 3 drug companies: Pfizer (the makers of Geodon), Janssen (the makers of Risperdal), and AstraZenica (the makers of Seroquel).  Any questions?

As an advocate of healthy non-compliance to brain-damaging health-destroying drug taking regimens, this is as gloomy a situation as I’ve ever seen. I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me.  I’d better get down to business pronto.

No More Back Stepping

“Mental illness” is a illusion, a joke, an excuse, a flat out lie. Something may be going on, but whatever that something is, it is not ‘illness’.

We’ve got a whole industry supporting the illusion that defective genes cause people to lead difficult lives that can be fixed only through the wonders of modern psychopharmacology. Complete and utter balderdash!

Was Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, mad? The lone gunman theory has evolved into the lone nutcase theory, and this, in turn, has started a trend in multiple murders. As murder has become some unfortunate peoples’ ticket into the national spotlight, you can expect this trend to continue.

I just read where Patrick Kennedy is pitching mental health insurance parity in Colorado. If “mental illness” is an illusion, what does that make mental health? I will give you a hint. Look to the attraction in tent number two.

This insurance parity thing has something to do with equating meta-physical illness with physical illness. Doing so allows all sorts of people to claim permanent disability payments on the basis of meta-physical (non-organic) criteria.

The government shells out, well, not so good money to subsidize this population of newly but artificially disabled people. Dead beat is not so dead beat if you can claim you’re loony toons. Hand in hand immaturity and irresponsibility have a great future before them.

You’ve got a profession that is poisoning people and calling it medicine. You’ve got a profession that is keeping people down, and saying it is “helping” them. You’ve got a profession that, rather than restoring people to purposeful activity, renders a portion of the population perpetual burdens to the rest of society.

I’ve had it with the entire profession. I will truck no more with psychiatry. I’m not the person to set up a Vichy style government in cahoots with these mad doctors. I don’t want to make matters worse. I’m sick of the corruption that pervades the mental health industry from one end to the other.

I think we should work to get people out of the mental health system. I think it is all the more imperative that we get people out of the mental health system because it is actually a “mental illness” system. Furthermore, it is a “mental illness” system on the verge of becoming a physical illness system.

Oh, didn’t I say “mental illness” was an illusion? Let me rephrase the comment that I just made then. I think we should work to get people out of the mental health system because it is actually a social and physical harm system. I think we should clean up this mess we’ve created by getting good people out of bad situations.

Complete irrationality may be the new trend on all levels of society, nonetheless, it is a trend I am hoping to buck. Communication, outside of military service, should never be a one way street. Somehow the typical argument that is winning the day has much more to do with expediency than it has to do with reality.

When people meet one to one, face to face, there is much that they can accomplish by working together. I don’t think we are accomplishing very much by savaging the human rights of an excluded segment of society. My intention is to work in the opposite direction and for the opposite result.

Living Without Psychiatry

Anyone who has read the typical mental health industry propaganda has read stories about people said to be ‘living with mental illness’. “Mental illness” is the imaginary bug that we just can’t seem to exterminate. Were there a real bug involved, maybe it would have earned it’s innoculation many years ago.

The first problem is linguistic. There is absolutely no way around the mind body duality we are confronted with here. The physical universe is real, the mental universe, not so much. We’ve just stumbled into the terrain of meta-physics, philosophical speculation. If you’re meta-physically ill, you’re literally not ill.

Psychiatry has managed to circumvent this dilemma with a convenient sleight by suggesting that “mental illness” actually is physical illness. Despite this suggestion, the rift remains impassable. More simply put, the message is not the messenger. It gets nowhere undelivered. You don’t arrive at consciousness by dissecting a brain.

So you can convince a person that he or she is “sick”. You can put a person on pills that will negatively affect his or her performance and health. You can tell him or her he or she will never be done with this imaginary illness he or she has, and that he or she will need to take those pills until the day he or she dies. What of it? Some people shovel shit for a living.

When living without “mental illness” is not presented as an option, you are going to get people saying they have a “mental illness”. In fact, there is little wonder you get people saying they have a “mental illness” when an entire medical profession encourages them to do so. Resisting the temptation to confess to an illness, there, as Hamlet might put it, is the rub.

I’ve read that ‘schizophrenics’ are illogical. I don’t see how this isn’t a shortcoming that a little bit of extra education couldn’t remedy. Logic itself is merely a method for arriving at the facts. An absence of logical deduction, and you’ve got someone who is at a remove from reality anyway. Why not provide them with the tools to help them determine what reality is, and what it is not?

We don’t call situations “sick”, we call them bad or good. When bad circumstances are a matter of drawing the short end of the stick, what can be done? Well, for one, there are two things I would suggest. Number one is to stop gambling, and number two is to change the situation. Bad circumstances need not repeat themselves ad nauseam.

Alright, I’ve tried to explain that what you are likely to get from a psychiatric examination is not a clean bill of good health, but rather a certificate of insanity. People who are not in need, the theory runs, don’t pay visits to the psychiatrist office. This is something to consider when making such visits a part of your regular regimen. If you’re ever going to get “well”, you have to stop doing so. You’re his or her bread and bacon. His or her addiction so to speak.

Not having a “mental illness” can be difficult for some people, all the same, I would encourage some of them to give it a whirl. There’s no reason in being stuck to a delimiting script like a fly to flypaper. If finding a ‘cure’ can be just as elusive as determining the ‘disease’, well, there you go. Perhaps it is just as simple as coming up with an opposing opinion, and learning to be politic (i.e. shrewd).

Psychosis Risk Weasels Its Way Into The DSM-5

Allen Frances in his ten worst changes to the DSM list misses one psychiatric label that has got to be as bad as many of those that did make his list.

Remember “psychosis risk syndrome? “Psychosis risk syndrome” is still there, only now it’s called “attenuated psychosis syndrome”.

Although I’ve seen websites saying, oh, “attenuated psychosis disorder” was thrown out of the DSM. (Allen Frances says as much in his post, DSM-5 Guide is Not Bible-Ignore It’s Ten Worse Changes.) This is untrue. It’s still there, and it’s still a problem.

“Attenuated psychosis syndrome” will be in section 3 of the new revision. Section 3 is for diagnoses requiring more research.

It won’t be reimbursed by insurance companies, but it will be there, and this is ominous. It means the possibility that it will be reimbursed by insurance companies in a future edition of the DSM is extremely high.

75 % of the people tagged pre-psychotic never go psychotic, and so this diagnostic label is extremely dangerous, and potentially contagious.

“Attenuated psychosis syndrome” is in the same section that includes “internet addiction”, the “behavioral addiction” some professionals want included so badly.

If it’s in the DSM at any place, from page one to the appendix, it is going to be applied to living human beings. Given this reality, the danger of increasing the “serious mental illness” rate substantially through the use of such a bogus diagnostic tag is very real, and it should be a major cause for concern.

Saying Yes To Health By Saying No To Labels And Drugs

I don’t have a “mental illness”. I see it as a revolutionary act to proclaim myself free of “mental illness”. It is a revolutionary act because psychiatrists had diagnosed me with a number of different “disorders of the mind” in the past. These same psychiatrists readily give negative prognoses’ for certain diagnoses’, among them some of the diagnoses’ they’d given me. I call it a revolutionary act because I have found that it is an act many people find themselves too cowardly to make. I don’t need a doctor to circumscribe terms for living my life, and I don’t need to pretend I need a doctor to do such.

In a mental hospital setting, where one has been involuntarily committed, by a hearing and not by a trial, one is expected to admit to having an “illness”. If one doesn’t admit to being “ill”, a prequisite for discharge, while one at one time would have been said to be using a defense mechanism, and being ‘in denial’ about the severity of his or her “disease”, now one is more likely to hear that one has ‘anosogosia’, a brain defect, that causes one to ‘lack insight’ into the nature of his or her “disease”. Non-admission of “illness” is seen as a further “symptom of illness”, or a further indication of the more serious nature of the impugned “illness”. This is the game, you go along, or you rot in a psychiatric facility.

It must first be remembered that one has been convicted of acting insane not by a jury, but by a judge, a few psychiatrists, and probably a public defender who was only pretending to defend his client. The suspect, in other words, is presumed to be “sick”, and no proof need be offered, for as long and until a mental health professional declares him or her otherwise. The thing is mental health professionals don’t hand out certificates of mental health or sanity. If they are going to verify anything, on paper, it’s usually to the instability that they would find in their captives. Of course, the appearance of “improvement” can open doors.

I am not a high functioning schizophrenic. I am not a high functioning person with bipolar disorder. I am not a high functioning depressive person. High functioning, in combination with “mental illness”, is an oxymoron. People are gauged by the DSM, the shrink’s label bible, according to levels of functionality, and people so labeled are not expected to be able to function at the level of people who bear no labels. I am, therefore, high functioning precisely because I am not schizophrenic, nor bipolar, nor depressed. The high functioning exception to the rule of low functioning is a ruse.

Much research has stirred up much confusion about so called “mental illnesses” and the direct effects of the drugs used to “manage” so called “symptoms“. When it comes to schizophrenia and neuroleptic drugs, a worsening condition is more often the result of the drugs than it is of the disease itself. Neuroleptic drugs reduce brain mass, induce apathy, and ultimately produce cognitive decline in the individuals who take them. Each of these conditions has been attributed to the progress of the disease. You would have to factor psychiatric drugs into the equation before you begin to figure out whether this is so or not, and this is not done in much research today precisely because it is driven by drug company marketing efforts.

I don’t take psychiatric drugs. I don’t need a psychiatrist to prescribe psychiatric drugs to me. I have recovered from any “mental disability” that I may have been said to have suffered from, and I did so without recourse to excessive psychiatric counseling. Usually this counseling involves little more than a script for a chemical agent to be ingested periodically. I don’t take psychiatric drugs because of the ill effects they have on my person, and because I have some knowledge as to how these drugs actually affect the brain and the body. I, in fact, attribute my continuing physical and mental well being to my aversion to taking psychiatric drugs. I think when you connect the “illness” with the drug you can begin to see the virtue in coming off.

We live in a prescription drug culture that has left many casualties in its wake, and you can read the names of some of the more notable cadavers in the dailies. I am proud, for the moment, to count myself among the survivors of psychiatric labeling, psychiatric drugging, and standard psychiatric malpractice. This survival would not have been the case had I passively concurred with some psychiatrist’s low opinion of myself and my chances. We need to change the predominate paradigm in mental health treatment today from one that relies so heavily on chemical sedation to one that deals with the problems of real people before we can advance. One sure sign that a person is mentally healthy is that they don’t rely upon drugs. I encourage others to do as I have done, in the name of saving lives, and to say no to psychiatry and psychiatric drugs.