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).

Psychiatrists Rip Off The People Of California For A Bundle

Bloomsberg recently ran a 6 part series of articles on America’s Great Payroll Giveaway, or on how wealthy Americans line the pockets of wealthy Americans. Part 2 in this series concerned psychiatry, and it bore the heading, California Psychiatrists Paid $400,000 Shows Bidding War. That $400,000 tab the American tax payer is picking up is approximate, a more or less. Sometimes it is, understating the case, a wee bit more…

Mohammad Safi, a graduate of a medical school in Afghanistan, began working as a psychiatrist at a California mental hospital in 2006, making $90,682 in his first six months. Last year, he took home $822,302, all of it paid by taxpayers.

When, following a law suit, pay increases were ordered for the states prison psychiatrists, as a lure for more prison psychiatrists, there became so many vacancies outside of the prison system that the state then had to order pay increases for psychiatrists across the board.

Safi benefited from what amounted to a bidding war after a federal court forced the state to improve inmate care. The prisons raised pay to lure psychiatrists, the mental health department followed suit to keep employees, and costs soared. Last year, 16 California psychiatrists, including Safi, made more than $400,000, while only one did in the other 11 most populous states, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The thing is that what we have here is a domino effect. These pay raises in turn affect service costs in other states.

The pay boosts caused staff costs for mental-health practitioners to rise elsewhere, said Stephen Mayberg, head of California’s mental health department in early 2007, when the raises started. Psychiatrists are among the highest paid employees in California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, data show.

One thing you can count on is that the rest of the mental health field, and former patients, aren’t pulling in nearly the figures these psychiatrists are raking in. Although the article suggests that with 48,000 psychiatrists in the USA there is still a great shortage of psychiatrists, I would suggest the opposite is true. With psychologists and social workers now taking up the responsibilities for counseling that once fell to psychiatrists trained in psychoanalysis, psychiatrists have become little more than pill pushers. What’s more, the pills they are pushing don’t help their patients recover.

We don’t need more overpaid professionals to push poisons on people. What we need are people who can deal with the power and wealth disparities that divide and crush people. Disparities such as those which came with such a windfall for psychiatrists, in their gated communities, while their clients have to struggle through a marginal existence in a ghetto of limited resources just to survive. Do something about that divide, change those circumstances, and I will bet you will begin to see recovery rates soar in this country the way we haven’t seen those rates climb in a very long while.

Misdiagnosis Australia Style

If you don’t think mistakes happen in the mental health field the following story from Top News, Man Drugged After Being Mistaken For Escaped Psychiatric Patient, should prove enlightening.

A patient escaped from Perth’s Graylands Mental Hospital at some point in the middle of December.

Police, on December 16, discovered another person who matched the description given by the hospital and he was taken to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and was kept there over the night. He was given the anti-psychotic drugs which made him ill.

A man misidentified as an escaped mental patient was hospitalized and drugged. Two days later the real escapee returned to the hospital and, oh oh, then the cat was out of the bag.

The real patient who had escaped returned to the hospital on December 18 and it was then the hospital realized that they have committed [a] mistake in identifying the man. The Minister for Mental Health, Helen Morton has now apologized to him for the huge mistake.

Helen Morton says the people responsible for this misadventure should be held accountable. I suppose that also means the possibility of a sizable financial settlement from the threat of civil litigation for some lucky cuss.

Now whatever “disorder” the man nabbed on the 16th actually had, that information isn’t being released to the public.

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.

The DSM-5 is only a dead sea scroll and not the fully approved Allen Frances version

I hear a constant buzzing. No, wait. It’s only Allen Frances.

The chief editor of the DSM-IV is posing as the chief critic of the DSM-5, if that makes any sense. The problem is that the criticisms this retired psychiatry professor applies to the DSM-5 apply to the DSM-IV as much as they do to anything, and I’m still waiting for a major display of remorse over that document.

If we look at his latest in a catalogue of complaints against the upcoming DSM revision, DSM-5 Is A Guide, Not A Bible—Simply Ignore Its 10 Worst Changes, some of his criticisms are right on target.

His numero uno is a real humdinger, Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD) or temper tantrum disorder. This is the DSM revision teams way to try to deal with an artificially created epidemic that isn’t even in the DSM. A Harvard psychiatrist developed this notion that a number of these kids diagnosed ADHD were actually bipolar, and thus began the pediatric bipolar disorder boom. The DSM revision team has simply created a third diagnosis with which to compound the prior two diagnoses. When ADHD and bipolar disorder are at epidemic proportions, this is certainly paving the way for a third wave. Just wait, perhaps in 10 or 20 years they will come up with an adult DMDD diagnosis.

His second and ninth complaints we can skip over. Sadness, grief, and anxiety aren’t illnesses, or diseases, or disorders, or whatever you want to call them. They are emotions known to all of us. The distinction between clinical and “normal” is a distinction between the everyday and the psychiatrized. If you want one, go about your business, it will come. If you want the other, see a shrink. He or she has their “help” to contribute.

Number 3 is Neurocognitive Disorder or old folks disease. Oh, yeah. Age happens to everybody. I kind of think it redundant as when the brain breaks you have dementia or Alzheimer’s. If we had a ready trash can we could scrap number 3, too, but, of course, psychiatrists must to make a…I dunno…Is it a living, or is it a killing? Anyway, it’s bread, bacon, and a big house in an upscale neighborhood.

Number 4 is adult ADHD. I think I covered the subject sufficiently with number 1. There was a time when there was absolutely no ADHD. A few unruly children popped up, and the editors of the DSM-III put it in the DSM. ADHD babies grow up. 30 years on and, it’s epidemic among children, while the revisers of the upcoming edition are making it an adult “disease”. Pill popping babies grow up to be pill popping adults. Although the drug companies know this, they aren’t letting on. Why nip a good thing in the bud.

Number 5 over eating isn’t a disorder any more than over drinking is a disorder. Alcohol poisoning, with attendant headaches, on the other hand, bellyaches, diarrhea, and vomit, are major concerns. If you’re going to over indulge, learn to under indulge, er, or moderate your appetites. If you need a shrink to do so, well, you’re probably pretty gullible when it comes to a number of these other disorders. Excess in anything could be “co-occurring”, lay talk for “co-morbid”, with any human trait, negatively labeled a disorder, under the sun, moon, and stars. Psychiatrists tend to think “mental disorders” lead to “substance abuse” and vice versa. What a racket!

His complaint number 6 is a little weird coming from a psychiatrist. This has to do with the switch from Autism and autism related disorders to a general Autism Spectrum Disorder.

School services should be tied more to educational need, less to a controversial psychiatric diagnosis created for clinical (not educational) purposes and whose rate is so sensitive to small changes in definition and assessment.

Alright. Should you be talking to the nation’s shrinks or the nation’s educators on this score, and then how does this effect other controversial juvenile diagnoses (say, ADHD, conduct disorder, etc.)? If your talking about the collusion between this nation’s educators, law enforcement officers, government officials, mental health workers and psychiatrists that is an even bigger issue than we’ve got time to cover right here and now.

Number 7 is certainly a valid complaint, and number 8 follows close behind. If recreational illicit substance use is abuse, habit and indulgence equals abuse, too. Although hypersexuality was not included in the upcoming revision, internet addiction is going to be there, and internet addiction is a behavioral addiction. Behavioral addiction opens up the flood gates for any fad or trend to be classified an addiction. If internet addiction makes this edition, you can bet other behavioral addictions are coming, and sexual addiction, however you spell it, is way up there at the top among the candidates for inclusions in future editions.

What he ignores is that these “worst changes”, as he puts it, are the result of a process and an idea that is thoroughly unscientific from beginning to end. You don’t find real diseases by inventing them, and voting them into common parlance. You only find fanciful diseases that way.

DSM-5 violates the most sacred (and most frequently ignored) tenet in medicine—First Do No Harm! That’s why this is such a sad moment.

We, in the psychiatric survivors movement, have been something similar for decades. What follows from this sacred tenet is my next question directed at Professor Frances. Why, given this basic tenet, do you need a guide book for doing harm to people at all?

This harm starts with the psychiatric label. The label is a category in the DSM. All further harm follows from this labeling of human beings as flawed or pathologically affected or unworthy. This labeling represents the beginning of a downward slide in perception from discourse between equals to that of discourse between designated authorities and sub-human second class citizens. Even if you’re using a bamboo pole and string rather than a rod and reel, a few of us still aren’t taking the bait.

Lengthy stays in Australia’s mental hospitals

If a recent report from New South Wales is to be believed, Australia needs to step into the twenty-first century. The Ombudsman for mental health facilities there has uncovered a few real horror stories. ABC News reported on the matter in a story bearing the headline, Psychiatric patients spending too long in hospital.

Bruce Barbour reviewed the files of 95 people in 11 mental health facilities across the State and found a lack of appropriate accommodation and support was leading to people being denied their right to live in the community.

His findings, in his own words, are startling.

“What was staggering was 13 people had been in hospital for over 20 years and indeed there were three people in hospital for over 40 years,” the Ombudsman said.

This is 13 people out of 95 people, well over 10 %. If the this selection accurately reflects the population in Australian mental institutions then there are way too many people abandoned, wasting away, and forgotten in them over long periods of their lifetimes.

“Two people had been in hospital from the time they were teenagers and that’s almost Dickensian, it’s just not something we should be seeing in the 21st century in this state.”

I think to call the situation ‘almost Dickensian’ is to understate it. Charles Dickens wouldn’t be so hard on the characters in his novels as the Australian authorities have been on some of their citizens.

Just think, some of these inmates have been incarcerated since a time when they were practically children. If children are innocent, such a claim can’t be made for their elders, particularly when their elders would condemn them to such a fate.

An Enabling Debility

I was watching mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. on You Tube the other day, and he made a point that I don’t think a lot of people are catching. The mental health consumer represents a failure on the part of psychiatry to restore mental patients to health. Where we used to have a mental health movement, now we have what has been referred to as a mental health consumer movement.

Nash also noted that the basic difference between a person said to be mentally ill and a person said to be mentally well was that the latter earned a living and the former didn’t earn a living. This is what the whole idea of functionality is all about, the ability to make a good wage slave on the jobs market.

Of course, now we’ve got this idea of “high functioning mental illness” where the old rules don’t apply. Seeing that “high functioning” coupled with “mental illness” is basically a contradiction in terms, how do we explain this phenomenon? A few mental patients, aka mental health consumers, have managed through “compliance” to advance in professional, often academic, careers.

I would say you have about three things going on here at once. A bright and resourceful individual. A person who has a great deal of support–legal, emotional, and social–perhaps more than people who are not so “handicapped” by impugned disease. On top of which you also have someone who would tend to be less heavily drug dose disabled than many people in treatment due to the achievement (as opposed to troubling behavior) that the person had displayed.

It must be remembered here that the idea is not to produce a better quality consumer, the idea is produce a healthy individual, a non-patient. The “high functioning mentally ill” person also suggests a failure of the system to restore that person in particular to his or her right mind. One is also left with the question, are we making “illness” in cases like these a form of “success”?

There are other people who have been fully restored to “sanity”, but there is little glory in recovering one’s mental health as long “notoriety” comes of not recovering. Anonymity may be noble, but it doesn’t pay the bills. Acclaim, in one instance, must prove as much of a disincentive to recovery as federal benefits prove in another. How much of this is a matter of our cracked actor or actress making the most of his or her crack?

Acclaim seldom comes of recovery. More often than not what you have is a mental health worker who was a former patient, and as such represents the worst of two worlds. Your prisoner has become a warder, and your penitentiary system has grown exponentially. I suppose it represents job security on his or her part, but still this means the streets have gotten a little bit meaner, and the neighborhoods have gotten a little less secure.

A Little Bit of Discretion, Please

Bad advice remains bad advice. Bad parents are gullible parents. Skepticism, given the amount of nonsense floating about in the world today, is a virtue.

Are you dealing with Turbulent teens or mental illness? this article in the The Gleaner from Jamaica would deceptively appear to ask. The article is actually selling “mental illness”. It suggests that any reader’s child could be “sick”. First thought. Read on, and damn your kid to a diminished life as a social and human failure in the mental sickness system if you want to do so, or think better of the matter, and go, “Wait a minute, maybe pegging my kid with a psychiatric label isn’t the best way to proceed at all”.

The article answers the question, “What should parents do?” with the following 7 alarmist answers that were probably dreamed up by a pharmaceutical company advertising team.

1. Be vigilant. 2. Seek professional help. 3. Do not be afraid to seek psychiatric care. 4. Do not shove it under the carpet. 5. There is danger in delay.

My response to this orange alert approach to problems in living is to reply, “Bullshit!” He or she who seeks to find “sickness” in a child will find it, and he or she who seeks to find “wellness” in a child will find that. This approach would hunt for “illness” rather than for “health”. To paraphrase gospel, “Let he or she who is without error attach the first label”.

The article supplies its own “mental illness” screening test of sorts. It gives 8 warning signs of “mental illness”. Now you’ve got a “mental illness” checklist if you are really desperate to have a child labeled, disposed of in the loony bin, locked away and abandoned. The message is clear. You, too, given this checklist, can bear a brood of loony birds.

1. Change in behavior. 2. Decline in school performance. 3. Drug use. 4. Poor self-care. 5. [Change in pattern of] Social interaction. 6. Communication is reduced. 7. Family breakdown. 8. Strange behavior.

I’ve got news for you. Each of the items on this checklist is a “symptom” of being a teenager. Adolescent rebellion is not a disease. Mom, Dad, get over it! Junior has to grow up. Mental health treatment or no mental health treatment, you shouldn’t try to hang onto your kid forever. Your child is merely testing his or her wings. Some parents will suffocate their kid rather than accept the simple truth that the kid needs more independence.

I could draw up a checklist for kids to use in diagnosing parents, too, but this is all about power, and we don’t give kids that kind of power until they are deemed old enough to use it. Unfortunately, some grown up kids never get old enough to use it wisely.

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.