An email sent out by the venerable Dr. Bonkers:
The Institute for Nearly Genuine Research announces two exciting new additions to our Marvelous Mental Medicine Show online gallery of psychiatric drug advertising. One is a 7-page ad for Ritalin; the other is a 9-page ad for Cylert. Both advertisements sell the idea that Minimal Brain Dysfunction is a child disease to be treated with stimulant medication.
In each case, we’ve compressed a multi-page ad into a single image, so our web page takes a few seconds to download, but it’s worth the wait. These vintage ads are classic examples of Big Pharma disease-mongering at its finest.
Step right up! See the birth of a discrete disease entity before your very eyes!
1970 Ritalin advertisement: The mean child who doesn’t mean it.
Continuing with what is becoming a series on brain neuroplasticity and what it means for those of us who have been told we can never recover. I suggest that proclamation is hogwash!
Taken from the Dalai Lama’s website for educational purposes:
(Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal) Dalai Lama helps scientists show the power of the mind to sculpt our gray matter.
Although science and religion are often in conflict, the Dalai Lama takes a different approach. Every year or so the head of Tibetan Buddhism invites a group of scientists to his home in Dharamsala, in Northern India, to discuss their work and how Buddhism might contribute to it.
In 2004 the subject was neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change its structure and function in response to experience. The following are vignettes adapted from “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain,” which describes this emerging area of science:
The Dalai Lama, who had watched a brain operation during a visit to an American medical school over a decade earlier, asked the surgeons a startling question: Can the mind shape brain matter?
- Controversial psychiatrist to head UM medical school department - Breaking News – MiamiHerald.com
- Drug makers find whistle-blowing a bitter pill to swallow | IndyStar.com | The Indianapolis Star
- “Overmedicating our kids” by Wanderings and Musings of a Stubborn Woman
- Mindfulness Meditation + Neuroscience = Healthier Relationships | Psychology Today
- At Top Schools, More Than Half the Profs Have Industry Ties – Health Blog – WSJ
- Bad moods may be good for memory: Study
- Letting Go of Stories About Other People | tinybuddha.com
- “Restless Vagina Syndrome”: Big Pharma’s Newest Fake Disease | Sex and Relationships | AlterNet
- What Soft Drinks are Doing to Your Body on Yahoo! Health
- Alison Bass: Is there a link between antidepressants and violence?
- Why boys are turning into girls
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the wonderful scientist, who has made meditation and mindfulness household terms gives a lecture here on this youtube video that takes place at Google.
In it he covers lots of scientific studies of the healing nature of meditation. There is no mysterious religious dogma here—what he presents has been studied clinically.
A couple of notes from my viewing of it.
Meditation is about paying attention and it has nothing to do with Buddhism (or it need not, in any case.)
It is attention for the sake of awareness. Awareness balances out thought in ways that are profoundly creative and we don’t learn this sort of awareness in our culture and certainly not in our schools.
He also suggests that if you change your perception of stress through meditation you can change the rate of bodily (physical) degradation. Stress actually causes illness. But in the process of changing our perception of stress we heal. Physically and mentally. He presents one study where in just 8 weeks of practice people with psychiatric disorders improve dramatically. Imagine what a life time of daily practice can bring us.
An inspiring idea he mentions—there are no positive or negative emotions—all emotions have information. If you know how to handle the information it can be very useful. And therefore one should not run away from any emotion. He recites Rumi’s Poem at this point:
The Guest House
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
~ Rumi ~
His overall message is in keeping with pieces I’ve posted on the neuroplasticity of the brain and the work that the Dalai Lama has done with neuroscientists. It turns out Jon Kabat-Zinn is part of that work with the Dalai Lama as well.
Kabat-Zinn says about neuroplasticity—in paraphrase—our brains are always synthesizing new neurons until we die. The restructuring of brain and healing happens through repetitive practice. Meditation is that repetitive practice in this instance. The brain is not static but is continually morphing itself. The brain can be restored!
This is a long video. I watched it over the course of the day in small bits. It was well worth it. Hint— the questions and answers at the end are fascinating.
If you want to experience more of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s teaching you can go here. I’ve read one of his books and have a couple of his guided meditations. His is a very user friendly introduction to meditation and mindfulness.
Do people suffer from psychiatric disorders/diseases or do people experience varying degrees of human suffering in their own idiosyncratic ways? — Tim Desmond
Today I have the pleasure of posting something that was submitted to me for publication. It’s written by an interesting man, whom I really don’t know but with whom I seem to share some quite similar ideas.
My work is informed by my study of coherence therapy with Bruce Ecker, its co-founder, as well as almost ten years of Buddhist meditation practice. Both of these traditions have taught me that understanding and acceptance are the path to deep and lasting change.
As a therapist, I see my clients as experts in their own experience and the ones who decide what change they want to make. My role is to help them discover what is keeping them stuck and transform whatever that is. I have found over and over again with my clients that there is a hidden emotional core at the root of each problem, and that change happens as soon as that core is recognized.
Tim Desmond offers phone counseling and training for therapists through his website
His piece follows here:
I was deeply touched by a piece on this blog called ‘Undiagnosing Myself.’ I wanted to contribute that from a scientific angle, the whole idea of using psychiatric diagnoses is profoundly flawed. To do so, I will summarize the work of psychologist and award-winning author Richard Bentall. Over the course of his career Richard Bentall has critiqued the medical model of modern psychiatric diagnosis and proposed instead a more personalized symptom-based approach.
The basic question is this: Do people suffer from a certain number of psychiatric disorders/diseases or do people experience varying degrees of human suffering in their own idiosyncratic ways? The modern mental health establishment clearly believes in the disorder/disease model as evidenced by the structure of the DSM and the theory of ‘chemical imbalance.’ This belief is so pervasive that even people who claim to disagree with the medical model of diagnosis often think within its terms. For example, the idea that one can be ‘misdiagnosed’ presupposes that a correct diagnosis could exist. Similarly, saying that schizophrenia is partially caused by psychological factors assumes that ’schizophrenia’ is a real condition — a valid way to group people.
The theory that psychological distress is caused by a finite number of psychiatric diseases can be attributed to Emil Kraepelin, who first published his Compendium of Psychiatry in 1883. Kraepelin believed that the psychiatric patients he treated suffered from diseases analogous to any treated by a practitioner of internal medicine. (This is reminiscent of the comparison made today between psychiatric diagnoses and diabetes forwarded by the pharmaceutical industry.) He said that different people with the same disease should have identical symptoms, identical anatomical problems and it should be due to the same cause. According to Kraepelin, all that was needed was for these diseases to be discovered in order for diagnosis and treatment in psychiatry to catch up with the rest of medicine. Since it was far beyond the knowledge of his time (or ours for that matter) to find common anatomical problems or causes, he chose to group symptoms. He believed that if he grouped symptoms ‘correctly’ the people grouped together would be sharing the same underlying disease. They would therefore have the same anatomical problems due to the same causes and respond more or less identically to treatment. He hoped that this kind of systematizing would lead to great advances in the efficacy of treatment.
While Kraepelin’s categories have changed over time and grown from 3 to over 200, the basic idea persists to this day – that there are a finite number of psychiatric disorders/diseases people can have and if we were to somehow group symptoms ‘correctly’ we would have isolated real disorders/diseases. After over 100 years of effort, we have not gotten any better at helping people with psychological distress nor have we found any real evidence that these diseases exist. In fact, there is a large body of research that directly contradicts his theory.
For example, you would expect that if one doctor diagnosed you with Strep Throat, you would be able to go to any other doctor and get the same diagnosis – and you’d be right. The reason for this is that Strep Throat is a real disease associated with an infection of streptococcal bacteria. You either have it or you don’t and there are reliable ways to test if you do.
However, if you are experiencing severe psychological distress and one psychiatrist diagnoses you with “bipolar disorder” there is only a 50-60% chance that the next one you see would give you the same diagnosis. Why is this? Both psychiatrists would have been highly trained in diagnosis, and they would be using the same criteria to make their judgment. So if one says you have PTSD, another says bipolar and a third says brief psychotic disorder, which is the “correct diagnosis?” What do you really have?
Richard Bentall argues that the problem is Kraepelin’s main assumption – that there are a finite number of psychiatric disorders – is just not true. You don’t have any of those disorders because they are not real. They were made up and there despite looking for evidence of them for over 100 years, none has been found. Instead he argues that someone who is experiencing emotional symptoms can be better understood as showing extreme expressions of normal human responses to distress.
Bentall advocates for abandoning psychiatric diagnoses altogether. He claims that psychiatry’s stubborn attempt to treat mental distress as a medical problem is what has led to its inability to improve treatment outcomes over time. Citing a large body of research, Bentall shows that symptoms from depressed mood to hallucinations can be accounted for psychologically and that doing so is not only more in line with science but more humanizing to people. Therefore he favors what he calls a ‘complaint-oriented’ approach in which each person would be assessed according to his or her unique symptomology. The focus becomes the symptoms themselves and we avoid trying to groups them into arbitrary made-up disorders. Symptoms (such as anixety) can be understood (as fear) and treated (by helping the person to feel safe), while disorders cannot because they are not real.
To learn more about Bentall’s work, read his ‘Madness Explained’ which won the British Psychological Society’s Book Award.
First published Oct. 2008
I had this poem taped on the wall of my bedroom above my bed from about the age of 12 until I moved out of the house to go to college. It was a rebel voice for me—it spoke to me of the freedom I knew should be mine.
Ironically enough, as an adult I found that my father had had the same poem in a poster format on his wall in his office. Retired it was now in his home. That puzzled me as I never felt respected by my father. Life is weird. But it somehow offered a lesson too.
On Children
Kahlil GibranYour children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let our bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Pat Deegan who I’ve mentioned on this site before speaks in this video of her experience of being diagnosed with schizophrenia and recovering. She also talks about what all of us who have been labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis experience—the loss of identity as it’s handed over to us being our disease.
I met Pat Deegan once and listened to her speak at a conference when I was a social worker. I was heavily medicated at the time.
I wish she would talk more about the importance questioning the overuse of meds. She’s gotten off meds but she takes a somewhat laissez faire approach to suggesting others are often extremely over-medicated. I don’t know if that’s quite fair to say, but she does work within the system, so she only rocks the boat so far, even though her story is a radical message and if one listens carefully she is certainly suggesting just that.
But I listened to her all those years ago, only half-way functioning, half a sleep on drugs and never realized just how much her story applied to me. The drugs were killing me just as they had muted her life completely before she freed herself from them. Perhaps she planted some seeds that took root later in my life.
And another great one:
Her website is here. It’s also been in my sidebar a long time and will remain there.
There is also a great interview with her on Madness Radio, which I may have actually put on my blog already….not sure. Much more details about her story in this interview. It’s truly worth listening to and it’s about an hour long.
So much for being told “schizophrenics” can’t recover! We all can recover. We need to believe it though!
First published 2008
From a couple of years ago here where I live.
By Karen Bartz — copyright 2009
I was asked by Gianna to write this account. There are many out there battling “mental illness” and they often find their way to the pages of somewhere like facebook looking for answers they do not get from orthodox medical treatments and as a way to communicate with the world that may be a bit too daunting close up. It is for their sake that I decided to share ~ love and bless.
It is my sincere belief that much of what our society terms “mental illness” are actually spiritual emergencies. My eldest daughter had such an episode after leaving school where she had been mercilessly bullied by both students and teachers alike for a number of years. She never really fitted the school model and, in hindsight would have been an ideal candidate for home schooling. Because of her school days experience, she had put in place certain barriers between herself and others that, frankly, once she left school, no longer served her. They had to come down.
She was at art school at the time, turning herself inside out for the sake of her art and often copping what appeared to be criticism from not particularly well directed lecturers. She was vegetarian but living on junk food, chain smoking, drinking instant coffee, diet coke, alcohol and hardly sleeping. When she confessed that she was no longer coping I convinced her to see a psychologist who said she needed to see a psychiatrist. The doctor gave her sleeping pills and antidepressants the psychiatrist gave her antipsychotic medication, even though they were all supposed to be in touch, no one thought to mention that she should not take the antipsychotic medication with the sleeping pills. She woke up and couldn’t move. At that point, I decided that I wouldn’t trust the medical profession with the care of my dog, let alone my daughter. The psychiatrist also suggested to her that she was considering having her committed. I was not involved or consulted as at 19, my daughter is an adult.
Fortunately the idea of committal scared my daughter so much that she agreed to move home and accept my help. It also made her realise that if she allowed herself to keep “free falling” that where she woke up might not be a very pretty place. I felt that with me she was almost certain to be safe at least and I felt that if she was committed she would probably go “so far inside out” that she would never return.
I also had the experience of never knowing one of my grandmothers because of schizophrenia. In those days they were locked up for good and the key was thrown away. My whole life I have missed this relationship and I always felt that she was the one person in my family I would have really related to.
So, my daughter moved home. I didn’t care if she lived in her room for the next five years, I felt she would be safer there. It is a difficult decision as you must be honest that whatever road you take you face the real possibility of losing someone you love dearly. The first thing I did was get her a kitten for Christmas. She had wanted one for a while but hadn’t gotten one because she was in rented accommodation. I knew that she may well have decided it was all too hard and left us but that she would never leave a pet. I got her out of the loop of having to see a psychiatrist by saying that she was frightened of the clinic (which was true) and that I was taking her to see a psychiatrist privately. Once they were “off the scent” I cancelled that appointment.
The next thing I did was take her to see a nutritionist, she agreed to that because they would not be “messing with her head”. She only took the antipsychotic medication a few times as it made it impossible for her to do even the simplest tasks. She had been having “grade A” panic attacks but I only saw this once after she moved home. If you didn’t know what it was, you would have thought she was dying. I held her as she sweated, vomited, almost fainted and just held her and kept saying quietly and calmly I am here, I am not going anywhere, it is alright, I love you. She had been so scared of the idea of being committed that she agreed to take supplements, which she took most of the time but i suspect she was still buying and eating junkfood quite often and certainly was still smoking and drinking instant coffe though the alcohol had gone. In addition, I also made a point of sitting with her for a half hour or so every day and we would talk out her day and go over any tensions to avoid any misunderstandings or things that she may construe the wrong way just to make the air as clear as possible at all times, so she could feel at ease and not stress over things.
We continued that way for a few months then she refused to take anymore supplements. I decided to see that as a positive as it also meant there was a bit of fight coming back. Very gradually I had been able to get her eating better food, she stopped the coffee and drank tea instead. She saw a good homeopath and commented after that “if I had seen her first, I wouldn’t have needed to see anyone else” After a year on Effexor, she decided to take herself off it as the doctor refused to help. She cut down the dose and was basically pretty spun out for about two weeks before it was out of her system. I believe that would be almost too difficult to do without a very safe and supportive environment. Later, her comment was that it was much worse than giving up smoking, she used to have to hug the wall closely to get up and down the stairs.
After being off Effexor for about a year, she switched to raw food and with that the last of the addictions, smoking went. I gave her herbal cigarettes for a short while but she managed to otherwise quit cold turkey and she also stopped black tea. It took about three and a half years before she was back working part time and she found a passion for permaculture and so is headed for a new life, drug free and happy enough.
I share this in the hope of offering help and hope to those and their families going through this. It was by far the hardest thing I have ever done. There are also ramifications within the family. After this episode I became ill myself. Would I do it again, probably. Would I expect anyone else in that position to do it, no, it is too much of an ask even for your own child. I learnt the true meaning of unconditional love and it has helped make me afraid of very little else in life, both of which I am very grateful, it has made me grateful.
My grandmother, even though I never met her, is with me every day. I know this and also several have seen her with me. At a meditation last night she was seen to give me a healing that was so intense I felt like I was going to melt down. In a way she left my mother when she “lost her mind” and in her turn my mother “left me”. It’s funny how the behaviour of one generation to the next can be almost “genetic”. If the pattern is not recognised it is repeated unthinkingly. But, we all choose our birth so there is no blame attached. I used to wonder if I had done something to cause my daughter’s “illness” but one day realised that I could also tell myself that she was given to me as I was best able to help her (just as likely to be true, so why not tell yourself the good story).
In some societies, these sensitives are the medicine men and healers because of their ability to pick up on so much. It is only in our society that they are drugged to prevent this and then removed form society’s view as they do not fit the “norm”. In my opinion, labels do nothing to assist anyone in a spiritual emergency and drugs just stop progress.
What I feel is required is a safe, secure environment with love, kindness and patience. Human rights, dignities and choices should be respected always. Is schizophrenia curable, at this stage, yes, looks like it is. She was young, 19 at the time and the brain does not finish developing until age 24, this may have had some bearing on the outcome, I’m not sure. But, so far, so good…
(editor’s note: I’ve seen hundreds of people recover at all points in life and the recovery stories page on this blog has some of those stories)
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.
If you like this lots more of Watts on youtube if you click through.
The possible hazards of benzodiazepine use (Xanax, Klonopin, Ativan, Valium etc)
This is another post from very early on in the life of my blog (day three to be precise.) I’ve amended it quite a bit as I’ve learned much more and my circumstances have changed significantly, so it’s up to date:
Except in the population of people taking only benzodiazepines and suffering as a result of them, the mental health community seems to have dropped out on commentary and critique on the dangers of benzos. You can say that they are not currently the drug “du jour” for critique. The atypical antipsychotics and anti-depressants now have a huge community of disaffected users who are very active online and on blogs. Benzos too deserve much criticism and in the underground of the mental health world there are thousands of us participating on benzo boards and email lists. There is not a much of a blog presence however among disaffected benzo users.
I have suffered ill effects from all the above mentioned classes of drugs; benzos, neuroleptics, anti-depressants, as well as stimulants and mood stabilizers. However because there is such an organized withdrawal community of benzo users on boards and email lists I’ve learned a significant percentage of what I know about psychiatric drug withdrawal in general from the benzo boards. We have yet to have the thousands of people withdrawing from neuroleptics though I certainly hope to see that day too. Benzos have been around a lot longer so there are simply more people who have figured out how damaging they are and have networked to get help from one another. Among neuroleptic users it’s much harder to find support and people who know what they are talking about regarding withdrawal.
Joy and Sorrow
Then a woman said, ‘Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.’
And he answered:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that hold your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Some of you say, ‘Joy is greater than sorrow,’ and others say, ‘Nay, sorrow is the greater.’
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
Kahlil Gibran
I’ve excerpted the first few paragraphs from an opinion piece today–continue there if you like. Some interesting thoughts to peruse:
All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has been become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has been effaced.
These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.
There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.” (read the rest)
Today’s piece is by Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in American a very compelling history of psychiatry. I post an interesting excerpt from this book here. Apparently a lot of “mad” folk don’t stay “mad” in countries where neuroleptics aren’t used.
Whitaker will be have a new book out in 2010. In it he chronicles and documents how long-term maintenance use of psychiatric medications can lead to chronicity and further debilitation and even permanent disability. To hear about his newest work you can listen to his latest interview on Madness Radio.
Below is posted additional information by Robert Whitaker:
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
Abstract
Over the past 50 years, there has been an astonishing increase in severe mental illness in the United States. The percentage of Americans disabled by mental illness has increased five-fold since 1955, when Thorazine—remembered today as psychiatry’s first “wonder” drug—was introduced into the market. The number of Americans disabled by mental illness has nearly doubled since 1987, when Prozac—the first in a second generation of wonder drugs for mental illness—was introduced. There are now nearly 6 million Americans disabled by mental illness, and this number increases by more than 400 people each day. A review of the scientific literature reveals that it is our drug-based paradigm of care that is fueling this epidemic. The drugs increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill, and induce new and more severe psychiatric symptoms in a significant percentage of patients.
The modern era of psychiatry is typically said to date back to 1955, when chlorpromazine, marketed as Thorazine, was introduced into asylum medicine. In 1955, the number of patients in public mental hospitals reached a highwater mark of 558,922 and then began to gradually decline, and historians typically credit this emptying of the state hospitals to chlorpromazine. As Edward Shorter wrote in his 1997 book, A History of Psychiatry, “Chlorpromazine initiated a revolution in psychiatry, comparable to the introduction of penicillin in general medicine.” (Shorter, 1997, p. 255). Haldol and other antipsychotic medications were soon brought to market, and then antidepressants and antianxiety drugs. Psychiatry now had drugs said to target specific illnesses, much like insulin for diabetes.
However, since 1955, when this modern era of psychopharmacology was born, there has been an astonishing rise in the incidence of severe mental illness in this country. Although the number of hospitalized mentally ill may have gone down, every other metric used to measure disabling mental illness in the United States has risen dramatically, so much so that E. Fuller Torrey, in his 2001 book The Invisible Plague, concluded that insanity had risen to the level of an “epidemic” (Torrey, 2001). Since this epidemic has unfolded in lockstep with the ever-increasing use of psychiatric drugs, an obvious question arises: Is our drug-based paradigm of care fueling this modern-day plague? read more…
Trauma is often the cause of mental illness. John Breeding again offers wonderful commentary on this phenomena. Hundreds of thousands of people are misdiagnosed with mental illness when their issue is actually the experience of trauma and meds are not the answer, the expression and discharge of the pain is what is needed. That and lots of support and listening from others. Mindfulness as well is part of healing.
Ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we do not let them complete their work. - Alan Watts
