Psychiatric Help Quotes

I think you're a terrible person and I hope you get some psychiatric help. Go to hell.

We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.

Most people expect survivors of this type of abuse to be extremely damaged and seriously disturbed individuals. Certainly most people around expect them to be in great need of psychiatric help... No matter what the survivor is in contact with a particular agency for, the assumption is quickly made that, because of the [ritual] abuse, there must be mental health problems of some kind present. Yet, this is not always the case.

Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated.

As a therapist, I have many avenues in which to learn about DID, but I hear exactly the opposite from clients and others who are struggling to understand their own existence. When I talk to them about the need to let supportive people into their lives, I always get a variation of the same answer. "It is not safe. They won't understand." My goal here is to provide a small piece of that gigantic puzzle of understanding. If this book helps someone with DID start a conversation with a supportive friend or family member, understanding will be increased.

Although it is important to be able to recognise and disclose symptom of physical illnesses or injury, you need to be more careful about revealing psychiatric symptoms. Unless you know that your doctor understands trauma symptoms, including dissociation, you are wise not to reveal too much. Too many medical professionals, including psychiatrists, believe that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia, that mood swings mean bipolar disorder which has to be medicated, and that depression requires electro-convulsive therapy if medication does not relieve it sufficiently. The “medical model” simply does not work for dissociation, and many treatments can do more harm than good... You do not have to tell someone everything just because he is she is a doctor. However, if you have a therapist, even a psychiatrist, who does understand, you need to encourage your parts to be honest with that person. Then you can get appropriate help.

[W]ay too much treatment is given to the normal "worried well" who are harmed by it; far too little help is available for those who are really ill and desperately need it. Two thirds of people with severe depression don't get treated for it, and many suffering with schizophrenia wind up in prisons. The writing is on the wall.

I have always been told that a person has to accept that the illness is chronic," she says, at the end of our interview. "You can be 'in recovery,' but you can never be 'recovered.' But I don't want to be on disability forever, and I have started to question whether depression is really a chemical thing. What are the origins of my despair? How can I really help myself? I want to honor the other parts of me, other than the sick part that I'm always thinking about. I think that depression is like a weed that I have been watering, and I want to pull up that weed, and I am starting to look to people for solutions. I really don't know what the drugs did for me all these years, but I do know that I am disappointed in how things have turned out." Such is Melissa Sances's story. Today it is a fairly common one. A distressed teenager is diagnosed with depression and put on an antidepressant, and years later he or she is still struggling with the condition. But if we return to the 1950s, we will discover that the depression rarely struck someone as young as Melissa, and it rarely turned into the chronic suffering that she has experienced. Her course of illness is, for the most part, unique to our times.

he and his fellow psychologists in training were entering the locked ward at the psychiatric hospital, the chief of psychiatry asked how many of them had ever been on the other side of the door. “The people in there are not nearly as scary as you might imagine,” the doctor

It was not easy to go from being one of the seven righteous pillars holding up the whole planet and human race to being just another mental patient. I remember talking to a woman who was ending racism and asking her if it was part of a bigger program or if racism was the whole deal. As someone who had gone back to the beginning of time and dealt with issues of whether or not life itself was a good idea, I wasn’t sure that just getting rid of racism was a big enough prize. ....In the eighties when I was called out of retirement to defeat communism, it was over my strenuous objections. “I don’t even dislike communism all that much,” I objected. “It seems so beside the point.” “The Republicans are going to take credit for this and ride it into the ground,” I correctly predicted. After winning many many preliminary rounds which I honestly hoped I’d lose, I was smuggled into what was thought to be just another psychiatric hospital where the Russian bear took one look at me, declined to dance, and the rest is history. My delusional world always felt kind of tinny and hollow, but that never helped me get out of it.

Overcoming problems on your own normalizes the situation, teaches new skills, and brings you closer to the people who were helpful. Taking a pill labels you as different and sick, even if you really aren't. Medication is essential when needed to reestablish homeostasis for those who are suffering from real psychiatric disorder. Medication interferes with homeostasis for those who are suffering from the problems of everyday life.

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

The fourteen-year-old Carmack was sent for psychiatric evaluation to help determine his sentence. He came into the room with a sizable chip on his shoulder. The interview didn’t go well. Carmack was later told the contents of his evaluation: “Boy behaves like a walking brain with legs . . . no empathy for other human beings.

My other client, whom I will call Teresa, thought Lorraine had MPD and hoped I could help her. Almost no one recognized this condition in those days. Lorraine was forty years old and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was thirteen. She had had various diagnoses, mainly severe depression, and she had made quite a few serious suicide attempts before I even met her. She had been given many courses of electric shock therapy, which would confuse her so much that she could not get together a coherent suicide plan for quite a while. Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad influence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.

Frankl is credited with establishing logotherapy as a psychiatric technique that uses existential analysis to help patients resolve their emotional conflicts. He stimulated many therapists to look beyond patients’ past or present problems to help them choose productive futures by making personal choices and taking responsibility for them.

The anti-psychiatrists held various, sometimes conflicting views but one particular line of reasoning is attributable to all of them—they all pitched their arguments against the power of the psychiatric establishment. They argued that the psychiatric diagnosis is scientifically meaningless. It is a way of labeling undesirable behaviour, under the guise of medical intervention. Those who are diagnosed ill are subjected to treatment which is a violation of human rights and dignity. The situation amounts to psychiatry having a mandate to declare some citizens unfit to live in an ‘ordinary’ community. It claims to cure but the supposed beneficiaries of that cure are often held in hospitals against their will. Within a structure like this it is impossible to understand the real nature of mental suffering and it is just as impossible to develop a coherent system of help.

Frankl is credited with establishing logotherapy as a psychiatric technique that uses existential analysis to help patients resolve their emotional conflicts. He stimulated many

Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.

Wallace Laboratories hired Salvador Dalí to help stoke Miltown fever, paying the great artist $35,000 to create an exhibit at an AMA convention that was meant to capture the magic of this new drug.

Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.

Stigma takes many forms, comes from all directions, is sometimes blatantly overt, but can also be remarkably subtle. It is the cruel comment, the unkind smirk, the extrusion from the group, the lost job opportunity, the rejected marriage proposal, the ineligibility for life insurance, the inability to adopt a child or pilot a plane. But it is also the reduced expectation, the helping hand when none is needed or wanted, the solicitous sympathy that one cannot really be expected to measure up. And the secondary psychological and practical harms of having a mental disorder come only partly from how others see you. A great deal of the trouble comes from the change in how you see yourself: the sense of being damaged goods, feeling not normal or worthy, not a full fledged member of the group. It is bad enough that stigma is so often associated with having a mental disorder, but the stigma that comes from being mislabeled with a fake diagnosis is a dead loss with absolutely no redeeming features.

Information on dissociative disorders, trauma, and mind control had been deliberately suppressed from the American psychiatric and psychological associations for so-called “reasons of national security.” The founder of the APA, Dr. Ewen Cameron, had been caught using CIA mind control methods at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada. The CIA was forced to compensate the victims, yet it took years2. In the meantime, educational institutions for mental health professionals lacked the facts necessary for treating the vast number of victims/survivors who were filling their offices in search of help and understanding.

Working to restore our voice with members of our first family can be a terrific learning experience. We didn't choose these difficult folks, but, as adults, how we talk to them is up to us. Observing and changing our part in family conversations is one royal road to change. In other words, if you can learn to speak clearly and to respond in a new way with your difficult mother or sister, then other relationships will be a piece of cake.

The koan is not a conundrum to be solved by a nimble wit. It is not a verbal psychiatric device for shocking the disintegrated ego of a student into some kind of stability. Nor, in my opinion, is it ever a paradoxical statement except to those who view it from outside. When the koan is resolved it is realized to be a simple and clear statement made from the state of consciousness which it has helped to awaken. —from The Zen Koan, by Ruth Fuller Sasaki

I do wonder what might have happened if [at age sixteen] I could have just talked to someone, and they could have helped me learn about what I could do on my own to be a healthy person. I never had a role model for that. They could have helped me with my eating problems, and my diet and exercise, and helped me learn how to take care of myself. Instead, it was you have this problem with your neurotransmitters, and so here, take this pill Zoloft, and when that didn’t work, it was take this pill Prozac, and when that didn’t work, it was take this pill Effexor, and then when I started having trouble sleeping, it was take this sleeping pill,” she says, her voice sounding more wistful than ever. “I am so tired of the pills.

Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36). Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved (35,36,39)." World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20. PMCID: PMC1489832 Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness PATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON

Regardless of past circumstances, the psychiatric patient must develop the strength to take the responsibility to fulfill his needs satisfactorily. Treatment, therefore, is not to give him understanding of past misfortunes which caused his "illness," but to help him to function in a better way right now.

The primary problem with modern psychiatry is its reduction of mental illness to bodily dysfunction. Objectification of those identified as mentally ill, by insisting on the somatic nature of their illness, may apparently simplify matters and help protect those trying to provide care from the pain experienced by those needing support. But psychiatric assessment too often fails to appreciate personal and social precursors of mental illness by avoiding or not taking account of such psychosocial considerations. Mainstream psychiatry acts on the somatic hypothesis of mental illness to the detriment of understanding people's problems.

In psychiatry, patients don't produce information as easily as they do in other medical settings. Most patients with physical disorders are frightened by their pain and eager to give information about it. Psychiatric patients have a very different relationship to their symptoms and don't always want to answer questions. Gertrude's patient probably found his rituals deeply embarrassing. He probably wanted the help, but he also probably wanted to tell this stranger as little as possible to get it. The paranoid patient, who has an unrealistic fixed belief that people are out to get him, may not feel, at the time, that it is of any relevance to the doctor that there is a conspiracy of aliens against him. The manic-depressive patient, whose judgment is usually quite poor during periods of illness, may take a dislike to the doctor and say that she has been behaving perfectly normally. Interviewing a psychiatric patient can be like trying to catch fish with your hands.

He tried to get help from the VA but he couldn’t, as so many other returning soldiers have discovered. He suffered terribly—nightmares, insomnia, flashbacks. He drank too much to mask these symptoms, and unfortunately alcohol only exacerbated the condition. It’s called post-traumatic stress and it is a recognized psychiatric disorder. It was around long before we had such a serious-sounding clinical name for it. In the Civil War, it was called a ‘soldier’s heart,’ which I think is the most accurate of the descriptions; in World War One, it was ‘shell shock,’ and during World War Two, ‘battle fatigue.’ In other words, war changes every soldier, but it has always profoundly damaged some of them.

God bless her, but the child is wild. It’s not her fault. But she’ll never be normal. At least let her enjoy her childhood. You read the report, didn’t you? There was rotten food in the fridge, clothes all over the floor. She came here wearing one of her father’s T-shirts and his baseball cap. You just wanted to throw out all the things that she had in her suitcase and give her a chance to start all over again. And the child’s fingernails were long. Who ever heard of long fingernails on a twelve-year-old? And she smelled!’ ‘Is she worse than Rodney?’ ‘Rodney? No, God no. She doesn’t need psychiatric help. I’m just saying that she needs a couple extra things like a sweater or some new toys of her own.’ Later that afternoon, Isabelle came into my room with a box filled with girls’ toys. I pulled out a blue pony with long yellow hair and pink seashells on its butt. ‘Who was Rodney?’ I asked her. A little boy who lived here and used to wear swimming goggles all the time. Who’s been talking to you about Rodney?’ ‘You mentioned him to the social worker.’ ‘Lord! Don’t worry what I say to the social worker. I have to make you sound like a real sorrowful case to be able to get you more things. See, I got you a pretty pony, didn’t I?’ I guess it was worth having your self-esteem destroyed if there was a free toy involved. Isabelle told me that she was trying to get us a subscription to Ranger Rick magazine. I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say about me to get it.

The DSMs have a mixed record. They have served an extremely valuable function in improving the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis and in encouraging a revolution in psychiatric research. But they have also had the very harmful unintended consequence of triggering and helping to maintain a runaway diagnostic inflation that threatens normal and results in massive overtreatment with psychiatric medication.

adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions’ general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children’s forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words. I

Today, according to the NIMH, bipolar illness affects one in every forty adults in the United States, and so, before we review the outcomes literature for this disorder, we need to try to understand this astonishing increase in its prevalence.9 Although the quick-and-easy explanation is that psychiatry has greatly expanded the diagnostic boundaries, that is only part of the story. Psychotropic drugs—both legal and illegal—have helped fuel the bipolar boom.

It’s joyful to know you could be diagnosed with a mental disorder but to opt out, to say yes to yourself instead, to have the patience and care to resist the label that never got you anywhere before, that was voted into existence as an illness, that simply isn’t helpful in looking at your life. Nothing tastes sweeter than inching toward self mastery, self intimacy, the progress that comes slowly over a long period of taking good care of yourself, the very best way you know how to, and very imperfectly at that.

After they broke up, Redse helped found OpenMind, a mental health resource network in California. She happened to read in a psychiatric manual about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and decided that Jobs perfectly met the criteria. “It fits so well and explained so much of what we had struggled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see,” she said. “It also explained some of the choices he’d made about his daughter Lisa at that time. I think the issue is empathy—the capacity for empathy is lacking.

I believe the perception of what people think about DID is I might be crazy, unstable, and low functioning. After my diagnosis, I took a risk by sharing my story with a few friends. It was quite upsetting to lose a long term relationship with a friend because she could not accept my diagnosis. But it spurred me to take action. I wanted people to be informed that anyone can have DID and achieve highly functioning lives. I was successful in a career, I was married with children, and very active in numerous activities. I was highly functioning because I could dissociate the trauma from my life through my alters. Essentially, I survived because of DID. That's not to say I didn't fall down along the way. There were long term therapy visits, and plenty of hospitalizations for depression, medication adjustments, and suicide attempts. After a year, it became evident I was truly a patient with the diagnosis of DID from my therapist and psychiatrist. I had two choices. First, I could accept it and make choices about how I was going to deal with it. My therapist told me when faced with DID, a patient can learn to live with the live with the alters and make them part of one's life. Or, perhaps, the patient would like to have the alters integrate into one person, the host, so there are no more alters. Everyone is different. The patient and the therapist need to decide which is best for the patient. Secondly, the other choice was to resist having alters all together and be miserable, stuck in an existence that would continue to be crippling. Most people with DID are cognizant something is not right with themselves even if they are not properly diagnosed. My therapist was trustworthy, honest, and compassionate. Never for a moment did I believe she would steer me in the wrong direction. With her help and guidance, I chose to learn and understand my disorder. It was a turning point.

According to Goffman, the Wise are those people (often with a close personal relationship to a stigmatised individual, such as the wife of a psychiatric patient) who do not subscribe to the prejudicial and stigmatising behaviours prevalent throughout society and do not let the stigmatisable status of an individual cloud their judgment on such persons. They are often afforded honorary status as “one of us” within communities of stigmatised people, and in return help the stigmatised people pass for Normals (as such they can often spot an otherwise passing individual because they are familiar with techniques which are employed to this end).

ME/CFS is not synonymous with depression or other psychiatric illnesses. The belief by some that they are the same has caused much con- fusion in the past, and inappropriate treatment. Nonpsychotic depression (major depression and dysthymia), anxiety disorders and somatization disorders are not diagnostically exclusionary, but may cause significant symptom overlap. Careful attention to the timing and correlation of symptoms, and a search for those characteristics of the symptoms that help to differentiate between diagnoses may be informative, e.g., exercise will tend to ameliorate depression whereas excessive exercise tends to have an adverse effect on ME/CFS patients.

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese

Because DID requires the presence of amnesia, DID patients are, by DSM-5 definition (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), unaware of some of their behavior in different states. Progress in treatment includes helping patients become more aware of, and in better control of, their behavior across all states. To those who have not had training in treating DID, this increased awareness may make it seem as if patients are creating new self-states, and “getting worse,” when in fact they are becoming aware of aspects of themselves for which they previously had limited or no awareness or control. Although some DID patients create new self-states in adulthood, clinicians strongly advise patients against so doing (Fine, 1989; ISSTD, 2011; Kluft, 1989).

To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.

Who Suffers? If you have social anxiety, you are not alone. The National Comorbidity Study found social phobia to be the third most common psychiatric disorder, after major depression and alcohol dependence. Experts believe that millions of people suffer from it. It is difficult to get exact numbers because the nature of social anxiety often makes it difficult for people to seek help. Many people who appear confident and strong suffer silently for years before telling anyone how they feel. In the general population, social anxiety appears to affect more women than men. This may be due in part to the social norms that determine that women should be less aggressive and more reserved than men. However, more men seek treatment, possibly because social anxiety has more of an impact on the jobs traditionally held by men. As gender roles in society continue to shift, these statistics will probably change.

But feeling ashamed and not telling anyone about it has NEVER HELPED. My hope is that by telling people about all this stuff, maybe others will relate. And then I won’t feel alone? And yes, of course, I’ll call my psychiatric nurse, Matt. Though he just changed insurances and I need to find somebody else. And Scott will call his therapist and his psychiatrist. And yes, we will call Deda and Jim from our Recovering Couples Anonymous meeting we’ve been attending and they will laugh. Deda will say, “Are you trying to scare each other?” Yes, yes we are! We thought it might help! And yes, twelve-steppers, we are “WORKING THE STEPS of the program,” you sanctimonious church basement carps! We are on step four, if you must know. I’d like to blame the above morning episode on myself or my poor diet or the city of Los Angeles or something about how and who I am that might be solved, but let’s just call it a Thursday.

1:THE “CRISIS”: Although Chief Judge Bazelon said in 1960 that “we desperately need all the help we can get from modern behavioral scientists”69 in dealing with the criminal law, the cold facts suggest no such desperation or crisis. Since the most reliable long-term crime data are on murder, what was the murder rate at that point? The number of murders committed in the United States in 1960 was less than in 1950, 1940, or 1930—even though the population was growing over those decades and murders in the two new states of Hawaii and Alaska were counted in the national statistics for the first time in 1960.70 The murder rate, in proportion to population, was in 1960 just under half of what it had been in 1934.71 As Judge Bazelon saw the criminal justice system in 1960, the problem was not with “the so-called criminal population”72 but with society, whose “need to punish” was a “primitive urge” that was “highly irrational”73—indeed, a “deep childish fear that with any reduction of punishment, multitudes would run amuck.”74 It was this “vindictiveness,” this “irrationality” of “notions and practices regarding punishment”75 that had to be corrected. The criminal “is like us, only somewhat weaker,” according to Judge Bazelon, and “needs help if he is going to bring out the good in himself and restrain the bad.”76 Society is indeed guilty of “creating this special class of human beings,” by its “social failure” for which “the criminal serves as a scapegoat.”77 Punishment is itself a “dehumanizing process” and a “social branding” which only promotes more crime.78 Since criminals “have a special problem and need special help,” Judge Bazelon argued for “psychiatric treatment” with “new, more sophisticated techniques” and asked: Would it really be the end of the world if all jails were turned into hospitals or rehabilitation centers?79

Ignatius, don't you think maybe you'd be happy if you went and took you a little rest at Charity?" "Are you referring to the psychiatric ward by any chance?" Ignatius demanded in a rage. "Do you think that I am insane? Do you suppose that some stupid psychiatrist could even attempt to fathom the workings of my psyche?" "You could just rest, honey. You could write some stuff in your little copybooks." "They would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!" "But, Ignatius, they help out a lot of people got problems." "Do you think that I have a problem?" Ignatius bellowed. "The only problem that those people have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions." "Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked." "Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr. Becnel one of the martyrs of our age.

Shortly after I returned home from the Ukraine, I became severely ill with what doctors believed was a parasite. I couldn’t hold my food down and lost a lot of weight. Different doctors kept prescribing me antibiotics, but none of them seemed to help. For a couple of months, I was poked and tested in a variety of ways, only to have more questions surface than answers. Then I was sent to an ear, nose, and throat doctor for an evaluation. I was sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of toddlers, when my name was called. By the time I got into the examination room I knew I’d had enough. “Hey, I’m outta here,” I told the doctor. “I’ll take my chance with the resurrection.” Well, a couple of weeks later, my insurance agent called me. He was one of my lifelong friends and sounded concerned. “Hey, Jase,” he said. “Your insurance company wants you to see a psychiatrist.” Apparently, the ear, nose, and throat doctor recommended I undergo a full psychiatric evaluation based on my refusal to be examined, along with my speech on the resurrection! Apparently, he thought I was crazy. I convinced my buddy that I didn’t need a psychiatrist and eventually got over my illness. I would later read a passage of scripture in the Bible that caused me to smile in reflection on the entire ordeal. Second Corinthians 5:13 says: “If we are out of our mind, as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

The story begins with the revelation Alicia murdered her husband. Why do you think the author made this admission at the very start?   2.  Alicia’s diary plays a key role in the book. What purpose do you think it serves? And does your perception of Alicia change the more you read?   3.  Alicia’s silence is related to the Greek myth of Alcestis. How do you feel about the story of the myth? Why do you think Alicia is silent?   4.  Theo’s motives to work with Alicia are complicated. Do you think he wanted to help her?   5.  Both Alicia and Theo had difficult childhoods. Early on, Theo says no one is born evil. That who we become depends on the environment into which we are born. By the end of the novel he appears to change his mind, saying that perhaps some of us are born evil, and, despite therapy, we remain that way. Which do you think is true?   6.  Weather plays a large role in the book, such as the heat wave during the summer. What purpose do you think the description of the weather serves in the novel?   7.  Do you think the world of a psychiatric unit was convincingly portrayed? How do you feel about Diomedes and the other psychiatrists?   8.  We never enter Kathy’s mind in the book. Do you have any sympathy for her?   9.  What do you think happens at the end of the book? The last line is ambiguous. 10.  It’s a psychological thriller with a twist. The author has said he was influenced by Agatha Christie. Did you feel this was simply a detective story or are there any other influences you can spot?

September 1995: Mark and I had our well documented book entitled TRANCE Formation of America published, complete with irrefutable graphic details which are in themselves evidence to present to Congress, all factions of law enforcement including the FBI, CIA, DIA, DEA, TBI, NSA, etc., all major news media groups, national and international human rights advocates, both American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations, the National Institute of Mental Health, and more… to no avail. TRANCE thoroughly exposes many of the perpe-TRAITORS and their agenda replete with names, which raises the question “why haven't we been sued?” The obvious answer is that the same “National Security Act” that continues to block our access to all avenues of justice and public exposure also prevents these criminals from inevitably bringing mind control to light through court procedures, an opportunity we would welcome. Meanwhile, as reported by both APAs, survivors of U.S. Government sponsored mind control began to surface all across our nation. The first to encounter the vast number of survivors were law enforcement and mental health professionals, and these professionals began to ask questions. in other countries, answers are being provided through somewhat less controlled media, reflecting the CIA's involvement in Project MK Ultra human rights atrocities. A television documentary entitled The Sleep Room aired across Canada by the Canadian Broadcast Corp. in the spring of 1998. Dr. Martin Orne, an associate boasted by Dr. William Mitchell M.D., Ph.D. who thrust Kelly into Vanderbilt's cover-up attempt (re: p.14), is named as an accomplice to Dr. Ewing Cameron's MK Ultra 'experiments' in Montreal, Quebec. Additionally, it should be known that Dr. Cameron went on to found the American Psychiatric Association, which has helped to maintain America's mental health profession in the dark ages of information control.

ever. Amen. Thank God for self-help books. No wonder the business is booming. It reminds me of junior high school, where everybody was afraid of the really cool kids because they knew the latest, most potent putdowns, and were not afraid to use them. Dah! But there must be another reason that one of the best-selling books in the history of the world is Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray. Could it be that our culture is oh so eager for a quick fix? What a relief it must be for some people to think “Oh, that’s why we fight like cats and dogs, it is because he’s from Mars and I am from Venus. I thought it was just because we’re messed up in the head.” Can you imagine Calvin Consumer’s excitement and relief to get the video on “The Secret to her Sexual Satisfaction” with Dr. GraySpot, a picture chart, a big pointer, and an X marking the spot. Could that “G” be for “giggle” rather than Dr. “Graffenberg?” Perhaps we are always looking for the secret, the gold mine, the G-spot because we are afraid of the real G-word: Growth—and the energy it requires of us. I am worried that just becoming more educated or well-read is chopping at the leaves of ignorance but is not cutting at the roots. Take my own example: I used to be a lowly busboy at 12 East Restaurant in Florida. One Christmas Eve the manager fired me for eating on the job. As I slunk away I muttered under my breath, “Scrooge!” Years later, after obtaining a Masters Degree in Psychology and getting a California license to practice psychotherapy, I was fired by the clinical director of a psychiatric institute for being unorthodox. This time I knew just what to say. This time I was much more assertive and articulate. As I left I told the director “You obviously have a narcissistic pseudo-neurotic paranoia of anything that does not fit your myopic Procrustean paradigm.” Thank God for higher education. No wonder colleges are packed. What if there was a language designed not to put down or control each other, but nurture and release each other to grow? What if you could develop a consciousness of expressing your feelings and needs fully and completely without having any intention of blaming, attacking, intimidating, begging, punishing, coercing or disrespecting the other person? What if there was a language that kept us focused in the present, and prevented us from speaking like moralistic mini-gods? There is: The name of one such language is Nonviolent Communication. Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication provides a wealth of simple principles and effective techniques to maintain a laser focus on the human heart and innocent child within the other person, even when they have lost contact with that part of themselves. You know how it is when you are hurt or scared: suddenly you become cold and critical, or aloof and analytical. Would it not be wonderful if someone could see through the mask, and warmly meet your need for understanding or reassurance? What I am presenting are some tools for staying locked onto the other person’s humanness, even when they have become an alien monster. Remember that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk was turned into a Klingon, and Bones was freaking out? (I felt sorry for Bones because I’ve had friends turn into Cling-ons too.) But then Spock, in his cool, Vulcan way, performed a mind meld to determine that James T. Kirk was trapped inside the alien form. And finally Scotty was able to put some dilithium crystals into his phaser and destroy the alien cloaking device, freeing the captain from his Klingon form. Oh, how I wish that, in my youth or childhood,

In those early days at the VA, we labeled our veterans with all sorts of diagnoses—alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mood disorder, even schizophrenia—and we tried every treatment in our textbooks. But for all our efforts it became clear that we were actually accomplishing very little. The powerful drugs we prescribed often left the men in such a fog that they could barely function. When we encouraged them to talk about the precise details of a traumatic event, we often inadvertently triggered a full-blown flashback, rather than helping them resolve the issue. Many of them dropped out of treatment because we were not only failing to help but also sometimes making things worse. A turning point arrived in 1980, when a group of Vietnam veterans, aided by the New York psychoanalysts Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton, successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which described a cluster of symptoms that was common, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of our veterans. Systematically identifying the symptoms and grouping them together into a disorder finally gave a name to the suffering of people who were overwhelmed by horror and helplessness. With the conceptual framework of PTSD in place, the stage was set for a radical change in our understanding of our patients. This eventually led to an explosion of research and attempts at finding effective treatments

among all psychiatric conditions, OCD is one of the few that does not respond very well to so-called placebo treatment—blank pills. Even with schizophrenia and depression, when people are given blank pills—pills that they think may be helping them—a fair number of them actually improve in the short term. But with persons with OCD, generally less than 10 percent get better when they are given placebos, so if something active isn’t being done to combat their symptoms, nothing really happens—or they get worse.

Hippocrates’s adage remains true for us today: “It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.”1 Both proponents and skeptics of psychiatric classification should agree on one thing: we are wonderfully and distressingly complex creatures. This should humble us and promote dependence on God as we seek to understand and provide help within a biblical framework to those who are especially troubled.

Clearly a mark of the in-breaking kingdom is the relief of suffering. As the Christmas hymn “Joy to the World” reminds us, Jesus “comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found.” Relief of suffering is a good and necessary thing. This in fact is where history is going; in the new heavens and earth there will be no crying or pain (Revelation 21:4). So when we seek to bring relief from suffering now, we are keeping in step with God’s plan of redemption. As the Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs said, contentment is “not opposed to all lawful seeking for help in different circumstances, nor endeavoring simply to be delivered out of present afflictions by the use of lawful means.”1 I believe medications can certainly be one of those lawful means. There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking relief from present suffering.

Sadly, however, I have met people who are better evangelists for Prozac than they are for the living God. Rather than viewing medication as simply one component of a full-orbed God-centered body-soul treatment approach, they view it almost as if it was their salvation. By definition, this is idolatry: attributing ultimate power and help to something other than our triune God. If a counselee believes that what ultimately matters is fine-tuning the dose of his Paxil, and finds discussion of spiritual things superfluous or irrelevant, that’s a problem. How a person responds when the medication works—or doesn’t work—reveals her basic posture before God. Thanksgiving and a more fervent seeking after God in the wake of medication success say one thing; a lack of gratitude and a comfort-driven forgetfulness of God say another. A commitment to trust God’s faithfulness and goodness in the wake of medication failure says one thing; a bitter, complaining distrust of his ways says another. So, receive the gift but look principally to the Giver. Whether a medication “works” or not, he is always working on your behalf.

What programs would a prison need to utilize in order to maximize the likelihood that the people sent to it would renounce violence as a behavioral strategy? To begin with, it would need to be an anti-prison. Beginning with its architecture, it would need to convey an entirely different message. Current prisons are modeled architecturally after zoos — or rather, after the kinds of zoos that used to exist, but that have been replaced with zoological parks because the animals' keepers began to realize that the old zoos, with concrete floors and walls and steel bars were too inhumane for animals to survive in. Yet we still keep our human animals in zoos that no humane society would permit for animals. And the architecture itself conveys that message to the prisoners: "You are an animal, for this is a zoo, and zoos are what animals are put in." And then we act surprised when the men and women we treat that way actually behave like animals, both when they are in this human zoo and after they return to the community. So we would need to build an anti-prison that would actually look as if it had been built for human beings rather than animals, i.e. that was as home-like and pleasant and civilized and human as possible. Once we had done that, we could offer those who had been sent there the opportunity to acquire as much education and/or vocational training as they had the ability and energy and interest to obtain. We would of course need to provide treatment for whatever medical, dental, psychiatric, or substance-abuse problems they had, and would want to incorporate many of the principles of a therapeutic community into the everyday routines of this residential school, with frequent group discussions with the other residents and staff members with training in psychotherapy. The goal would be to replace the "monster factories" that most prisons now are with therapeutic communities designed to enable people who are deeply damaged, and damaging, to recover their humanity or to gain a degree of humanity they had never been able to acquire; in short, to help them heal themselves and learn, in the process, how to heal others and even repair some of the damage they have done.

I strongly encourage those reading this book to seek out therapy, psychiatric care, support groups, or other resources to help navigate your recovery process.

Going to therapy and talking about healing may just be the go-to flex of our time. It is supposedly an indicator of how profoundly self-aware, enlightened, emotionally mature, or “evolved” an individual is. Social media is obsessed and saturated with pop psychology and psychiatry content related to “healing”, trauma, embodiment, neurodiversity, psychiatric diagnoses, treatments alongside productivity hacks, self-care tips and advice on how to love yourself without depending on anyone else, cut people out of your life, manifest your goals to be successful, etc. Therapy isn’t a universal indicator of morality or enlightenment. Therapy isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that everyone must pursue. There are many complex political and cultural reasons why some people don’t go to therapy, and some may actually have more sustainable support or care practices rooted in the community. This is similar to other messaging, like “You have to learn to love yourself first before someone else can love you”. It all feeds into the lie that we are alone and that happiness comes from total independence. Mainstream therapy blames you for your problems or blames other people, and often it oscillates between both extremes. If we point fingers at ourselves or each other, we are too distracted to notice the exploitative systems making us all sick and sad. Oftentimes, people come out of therapy feeling fully affirmed and unconditionally validated, and this ego-caressing can feel rewarding in the moment even if it doesn’t help ignite any growth or transformation. People are convinced that they can do no wrong, are infallible, incapable of causing harm, and that other people are the problem. Treatment then focuses on inflating self-confidence, self-worth, self-acceptance, and self-love to chase one’s self-centered dreams, ambitions, and aspirations without taking any accountability for one’s own actions. This sort of individualistic therapeutic approach encourages isolation and a general mistrust of others who are framed as threats to our inner peace or extractors of energy, and it further breeds a superiority complex. People are encouraged to see relationships as accessories and means to a greater selfish end. The focus is on what someone can do for you and not on how to give, care for, or show up for other people. People are not pushed to examine how oppressive conditioning under these systems shows up in their relationships because that level of introspection and growth is simply too invalidating. “You don’t owe anyone anything. No one is entitled to your time and energy. If anyone invalidates you and disturbs your peace, they are toxic; cut them out of your life. You don’t need that negativity. You don’t need anyone else; you alone are enough. Put yourself first. You are perfect just the way you are.” In reality, we all have work to do. We are all socialized within these systems, and real support requires accountability. Our liberation is contingent on us being aware of our bullshit, understanding the values of the empire that we may have internalized as our own, and working on changing these patterns. Therapized people may fixate on dissecting, healing, improving, and optimizing themselves in isolation, guided by a therapist, without necessarily practicing vulnerability and accountability in relationships, or they may simply chase validation while rejecting the discomfort that comes from accountability. Healing in any form requires growth and a willingness to practice in relationships; it is not solely validating or invalidating; it is complex; it is not a goal to achieve but a lifelong process that no one is above; it is both liberating and difficult; it is about acceptance and a willingness to change or transform into something new; and ultimately, it is going to require many invalidating ego deaths so we can let go of the fixation of the “self” to ease into interdependence and community care.

Sitting on the couch in the trailer watching TV one late night, I saw an infomercial for a series of audiocassettes called Attacking Anxiety and Depression from the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. Without a moment’s hesitation I reached for the phone, called the 800 number on the TV screen and purchased the tapes. When the tapes arrived a few days later, I popped in the first cassette in the sixteen-cassette self-help series—which was comprised of testimonials from people afflicted with panic attacks—and realized that I wasn’t going crazy, that this was indeed a legitimate psychiatric disorder. As I listened to the remainder of the series in our trailer, I began to grasp that my brain could tell me something so convincingly that I had almost no choice but to believe it. During anxiety attacks I actually believed that I was dying. The attacks were so severe that I would have rather known that I was going to have open heart surgery at 9:00 a.m. the next day than a panic attack. That was the power of the nervous system: we can think things that aren’t true and feel and see things that aren’t real. With the Attacking Anxiety and Depression tapes suddenly the subjective no longer held the power for me that it had once held. Indeed, what I was learning about the power of the mind just might explain some of the experiences I’d had in the past—like speaking with God or hearing his voice. It was neurologically possible to hear an audible voice when there was no voice there. I began to entertain the possibility that there was an objective way of looking at my experiences, and that this objective perspective might prove those experiences to be false. Up until that moment seeing truly was believing, but what did it say about my beliefs if I had not seen or heard anything at all?

Psychiatric dogma to the contrary, one’s emotions would work out their own problems or they wouldn’t; thinking about them wouldn’t help.

When the job goes bad, when a cherished project fails, when someone you count on leaves you or dies, there are few things as helpful as moving your muscles and doing something that demands focused attention. Inner-city schools and psychiatric programs often lose sight of this. They want the kids to behave “normally”—without building the competencies that will make them feel normal.

The tension in Ken’s voice made Jack glance at him sharply. “Ken, I know you’re struggling here . . .” Ken shook his head. “Don’t even go there. I wanted to kill that man for just being near her. It wasn’t that he hit her. He was a dead man the moment he did that, we both know that, but I wanted it before he was that stupid.” Jack sent a small, tight smile in his brother’s general direction. “I wanted to kill him too, Ken. That doesn’t mean either of us is like our father. It means we might need psychiatric help, but it doesn’t mean what you think it does.” “She makes me crazy.” “She’s supposed to make you crazy

This is, of course, true for all of us. When the job goes bad, when a cherished project fails, when someone you count on leaves you or dies, there are few things as helpful as moving your muscles and doing something that demands focused attention. Inner-city schools and psychiatric programs often lose sight of this. They want the kids to behave “normally”—without building the competencies that will make them feel normal.

The truth is, wanting to harm or kill someone is a common part of the human mental circus. While there are some moral saints out there who have never wished ill on anyone, twenty percent of human beings have weighed the pros and cons of killing someone at some point in their lives. Five percent have the moral flexibility to act on the possibility. A tenth of a percent obsess over it, and the best intentioned of those seek psychiatric help with their fixation.

Why is she in there, Conrad?” My voice shook as I closed my eyes with my hand across my pounding heart as if I could steady it. “She’s in there by choice.” “If she has psychiatric issues, then why is she not seeing a psychiatrist? Why would she need your dad?” “My dad is helping them, Demi. He’s doing a free experimental study—it’s actually FDA approved. He’s saving the lives no one else could.” Conrad tilted my head up, forcing me to open my eyes and look at him. “Do you actually believe that?” I squinted at him as his fingers traced my jawline. “Yes, I do.

Is the theory that lifeless, mindless atoms (obeying either deterministic laws or probabilistic laws of indeterminism) produce weird, unfathomable, ineffectual, pointless, mental illusions supposed to be more convincing than that we have genuine free will? The whole notion that a world made exclusively of matter, as materialist fundamentalists such as Harris insist, can suffer from illusions, delusions, hallucinations, mental illness, mental breakdowns, mental disorders, is so spectacularly silly that no sane person could ever take it seriously. Harris, in his pathological determination to rid us of free will, has posited instead a world of delusional atoms in need of psychiatric help! What, do electrons hallucinate? Do protons have delusions of grandeur? Do quarks imagine themselves free? Are 1D-strings narcissistic? If none of these things is true, how on earth does Sam Harris propose that if humans are made of atoms alone, we can suffer from such illusions? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and Harris doesn’t offer any evidence at all!

can’t tell you how many people feel incredibly relieved when they get an explanation of how their brain is working, and why. We don’t give them a psychiatric label. We’re just saying this is the way you’re organized and it’s absolutely predictable based upon what happened to you. Then we help them understand that the brain is malleable, “plastic,” changeable. And together we come up with a plan that will help change some of the systems that appear to be causing them problems.

In rare instances when the scapegoating family member(s) do agree to meet in a family therapy setting with the FSA survivor, their egoic defenses will make them intractable in their position that they are ‘right’ and that the scapegoated family member is the ‘offender’ (this is especially true when the scapegoated family member is known to be an alcoholic/addict or has a  history of psychiatric hospitalization). They might even claim that they are the victim, denying their hurtful behaviors altogether, thereby victimizing the scapegoated family member twice. This strategic defense maneuver is known as DARVO, which stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender” (Freyd, J.J. 1997). This is especially the case in families where there are ‘secrets’, such as sexual/physical abuse of the scapegoated child.

Still, the story hangs over her memoir, and over the history of law and psychiatry, whose marriage, divorce, and rapprochement are still wending their slow, uncertain way through the courts. The young man had needed psychiatric help but had received legal help. Now he needed legal help. Perhaps in jail he would receive psychiatric help.

Several countries also observed that following the arrival of the SSRIs, the number of their citizens disabled by depression dramatically increased. In Britain, the “number of days of incapacity” due to depression and neurotic disorders jumped from 38 million in 1984 to 117 million in 1995, a threefold increase.62 Iceland reported that the percentage of its population disabled by depression nearly doubled from 1976 to 2000. If antidepressants were truly helpful, the Iceland investigators reasoned, then the use of these drugs “might have been expected to have a public health impact by reducing disability, morbidity, and mortality due to depressive disorders.”63 In the United States, the percentage of working-age Americans who said in health surveys that they were disabled by depression tripled during the 1990s.64

All of this told of harm done, of a drug that made a child depressed, lonely, and filled with a sense of inadequacy, and when researchers looked at whether Ritalin at least helped hyperactive children fare well academically, to get good grades and thus succeed as students, they found that it wasn’t so. Being able to focus intently on a math test, it turned out, didn’t translate into long-term academic achievement. This drug, Sroufe explained in 1973, enhances performance on “repetitive, routinized tasks that require sustained attention,” but “reasoning, problem solving and learning do not seem to be [positively] affected.”26 Five years later, Herbert Rie was much more negative. He reported that Ritalin did not produce any benefit on the students’ “vocabulary, reading, spelling, or math,” and hindered their ability to solve problems. “The reactions of the children strongly suggest a reduction in commitment of the sort that would seem critical for learning.”27 That same year, Russell Barkley at the Medical College of Wisconsin reviewed the relevant scientific literature and concluded “the major effect of stimulants appears to be an improvement in classroom manageability rather than academic performance.”28 Next it was James Swanson’s turn to weigh in. The fact that the drugs often left children “isolated, withdrawn and overfocused” could “impair rather than improve learning,” he said.29 Carol Whalen, a psychologist from the University of California at Irvine, noted in 1997 that “especially worrisome has been the suggestion that the unsalutary effects [of Ritalin] occur in the realm of complex, high-order cognitive functions such as flexible problem-solving or divergent thinking.”30 Finally, in 2002, Canadian investigators conducted a meta-analysis of the literature, reviewing fourteen studies involving 1,379 youths that had lasted at least three months, and they determined that there was “little evidence for improved academic performance.”31

When you encounter anyone - whether they have an intellectual, psychiatric, or physical disability, or none at all - one character strength in particular will always help you both: The kindness you show to others helps them, helps you, and helps anyone who is witness to it. Kindness creates a strong ripple effect due to the phenomenon I spoke of earlier known as elevation. Finding a way to be kind has real value - it is the fastest way to bring you out of your negative mood, and the most direct way of helping someone else. As the story of Walden House shows, we are intricately woven together in a delicate balance. In the end, we are all responsible for helping one another live happier lives.

In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness" (2007) Christopher Lane describes how pharmaceutical companies helped to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to include social phobia in the "DSM" of 1980. He argues that the diagnosis in many cases turned a personality trait into an illness, pathologising people who were resvered, private or quiet. 'Over the course of six years,' he writes, 'a small group of self-selecting American psychiatrists built a sweeping new consensus: shyness and a host of comparable traits were anxiety and personality disorders. And they stemmed not from psychological conflicts or social tensions, but rather from a chemical imbalance or faulty neurotransmitters in the brain.' Lane believes that there is a great cost to medicalising our quirks, eccentricities and ordinary feelings. "The sad consequence,' he says, 'is a vast, perhaps irrecoverable, loss of emotional range, an impovershment of human experience.

Education about ADD—its impact on home, school, family, and the self—is the first step in treatment. The more accurate information you have the more likely you are to get the best help. Robert Pasnau, M.D., past president of the American Psychiatric Association, said that coping requires three things: information, self-esteem, and a sense of control. Obtaining accurate information is the critical first step in treating this disorder.

As you can see, you can actually change the way you feel merely by changing your body posture or facial expression. It is what some people call “fake it until you make it.” For instance, you can put a smile on your face to make you feel happier. Conversely, you can negatively affect your mood and even create a depression by changing your body posture. David K. Reynolds, in his book Constructive Living, explained how he changed his identity for his alter ego, David Kent, and created a depressed, suicidal patient. The goal was to be accepted as an anonymous patient into various psychiatric facilities to assess them from the inside. Note that he wasn’t simulating depression, he was actually depressed. Psychological tests proved it. Here is how he created depression: Depression can be created by sitting slouched in a chair, shoulders hunched, head hanging down. Repeat these words over and over: ‘There’s nothing anybody can do. No one can help. It’s hopeless. I’m helpless. I give up.’ Shake your head, sigh, cry. In general, act depressed and the genuine feeling will follow in time. ​— ​DAVID K. REYNOLDS, CONSTRUCTIVE LIVING.

The mental health field also maintains authority through selectivity of its members and suppressed dissent. There is a pretense of certainty propagated by leaders in mental health, with oft repeated promises of supporting evidence to be discovered soon; it is taken for granted that their authoritative stance is merited. Despite this political posturing, several areas of concern actually leave much to question, for instance: it is rare for findings to be replicated (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), with only about 3% of journals even being willing to accept articles attempting to repeat previous studies to see if their findings were more than just a fluke (Martin & Clarke, 2017); the peer -review process of journals is biased toward recognizable names and against newcomers or detractors (Bravo, Farjam, Grimaldo Moreno, Birukou, & Squazzoni, 2018), setting up a sort of “good ol’ boys’ club” dynamic; the rates of authors retracting their studies due to problems or false findings are rapidly rising (Steen, Casadevall, & Fang, 2013); the subjects used in studies are consistently biased (Nielsen, Haun, Kartner, & Legare, 2017) and based on samples that are among the least representative of humans, in general (e.g., Arnett, 2008); spurious and meaningless correlations are frequently reported as exciting new discoveries (see Richardson, 2017); gold-standard “evidence-based treatments” are, on average and at best, only helpful for about 25% of people (Shedler, 2015); selective reporting, guild interests, and researcher allegiance heavily bias psychiatric research (Leichsenring et al., 2017; Whitaker & Cosgrove, 2015); and, perhaps most important, with all the purported advances in treatment, the prevalence and long-term outcomes of diagnosable mental disorders has not decreased in the last century (Jorm, Patten, Brugha, & Mojtabai, 2017; Margraf & Schneider, 2016), while disability rates continue to rise exponentially (see Whitaker, 2010 for an analysis on this trend).

Ghosts are a bit like people with psychiatric disorders. They cannot distinguish illusion from reality. When a soul is trapped here, it needs a guide—a spirit guide, if you will—to help lead it to the light.” “Wait. Now you want me to be a ghost guide?

Human beings were not designed to abort children. They were designed to fulfill a desire to give birth; therefore, the damage which abortion does cannot be repaired by psychological or psychiatric measures (although these measures can help) but by God Himself. Only He can repair the damage to the sacred sanctuary where He encounters the creature of His desire. The healing of abortion grief comes when there is an encounter between the sinner and God. When this reconciliation is facilitated then solidarity with God and neighbor (including the aborted infant) is reestablished and reintegration into the human and heavenly family is achieved.

But if Hubbard really did cure himself of his mythical injuries by 1947, why was he still claiming a part disability pension? Why did he write to Veterans Administration in October of the same year saying he’d been ‘trying and failing for two years to regain my equilibrium in civil life’ and asking for help paying for psychiatric treatment? Why did he continue to lobby for an increase to his pension over this period of time? And why was it the case that he claimed a disability pension for decades afterwards?46 Some

Unfortunately, some real autistics who have real problems that cannot be helped by military schools or boot camps, find themselves in military academies and boot camps anyway. They may need psychological or psychiatric care, and never receive it. It is these people who autistic advocacy organizations talk about when speaking against the idea of military schools and boot camps, but ironically, some people in some of these autistic advocacy organizations are manipulators themselves, and might benefit from a

Our immune system does not exist in isolation from daily experience. For example, the immune defences that normally function in healthy young people have been shown to be suppressed in medical students under the pressure of final examinations. Of even greater implication for their future health and well-being, the loneliest students suffered the greatest negative impact on their immune systems. Loneliness has been similarly associated with diminished immune activity in a group of psychiatric inpatients. Even if no further research evidence existed—though there is plenty—one would have to consider the long-term effects of chronic stress. The pressure of examinations is obvious and short term, but many people unwittingly spend their entire lives as if under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs. Many of us live, if not alone, then in emotionally inadequate relationships that do not recognize or honour our deepest needs. Isolation and stress affect many who may believe their lives are quite satisfactory. How may stress be transmuted into illness? Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence—and are influenced by—the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defences and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body’s physical states. When emotions are repressed, this inhibition disarms the body’s defences against illness. Repression—dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm—disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors.

The World Health Organization has twice found that schizophrenia outcomes are much, much better in poor countries like India, Nigeria, and Colombia than in the United States and other rich countries. Moreover, the number of psychiatrically disabled people in the United States has increased from 600,000 in 1955 to nearly six million today, a statistic that shows we still do not have a form of care that truly helps people recover, and even suggests that we are doing something today that may actively prevent recovery.

The supporters of the idea of healing through forgetting obviously are not aware of the price society pays for this "health." It is a known fact that the men and women who helped Hitler commit mass murder did not need psychiatric help. They adapted excellently to conditions under the Third Reich and later effortlessly made the transition to postwar life. They could easily forget. They held down jobs, started families, mistreated their own children—all without the slightest twinge of guilt. These people didn't dream. And they never for a moment thought that they had done something terrible by carrying out their "duty." Hitler and those like him were, indeed, proud of their ability to forget their traumas. But surely we don't want to pay the price for forgetfulness.

I read Flirting With The Dead. You need psychiatric help :)

Bill Wilson would never have another drink. For the next thirty-six years, until he died of emphysema in 1971, he would devote himself to founding, building, and spreading Alcoholics Anonymous, until it became the largest, most well-known and successful habit-changing organization in the world. An estimated 2.1 million people seek help from AA each year, and as many as 10 million alcoholics may have achieved sobriety through the group.3.12,3.13 AA doesn’t work for everyone—success rates are difficult to measure, because of participants’ anonymity—but millions credit the program with saving their lives. AA’s foundational credo, the famous twelve steps, have become cultural lodestones incorporated into treatment programs for overeating, gambling, debt, sex, drugs, hoarding, self-mutilation, smoking, video game addictions, emotional dependency, and dozens of other destructive behaviors. The group’s techniques offer, in many respects, one of the most powerful formulas for change. All of which is somewhat unexpected, because AA has almost no grounding in science or most accepted therapeutic methods. Alcoholism, of course, is more than a habit. It’s a physical addiction with psychological and perhaps genetic roots. What’s interesting about AA, however, is that the program doesn’t directly attack many of the psychiatric or biochemical issues that researchers say are often at the core of why alcoholics drink.3.14 In fact, AA’s methods seem to sidestep scientific and medical findings altogether, as well as the types of intervention many psychiatrists say alcoholics really need.1 What AA provides instead is a method for attacking the habits that surround alcohol use.3.15 AA, in essence, is a giant machine for changing habit loops. And though the habits associated with alcoholism are extreme, the lessons AA provides demonstrate how almost any habit—even the most obstinate—can be changed.

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus.

I attempted to be clear and straightforward in my approach to Dr Tate, deferring to his medical expertise and stating my desire merely to be helpful. Renee and Joan Frances, in turn, were clear and straightforward about their needs in a way that was new for them. Yet we were seen as manipulative multiple and puppet therapist. Renee had probably never been less manipulative in her life than when she was trying to reason with Dr. Tate.

The fading relevance of the nature–nurture argument has recently been revived by the rise of evolutionary psychology. A more sophisticated understanding of Darwinian evolution (survival of the fittest) has led to theories about the possible evolutionary value of some psychiatric disorders. A simplistic view would predict that all mental illnesses with a genetic component should lower survival and ought to die out. ‘Inclusive fitness’, however, assesses the evolutionary value of a characteristic not simply on whether it helps that individual to survive but whether it makes it more likely that their offspring will survive. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene gives convincing explanations of the evolutionary advantages of group support and altruism when individuals sacrifice themselves for others. A range of speculative hypotheses have since been proposed for the evolutionary advantage of various behaviour differences and mental illnesses. Many of these draw on ethological games-theory (i.e. the benefits of any behaviour can only be understood in the context of the behaviour of other members of the group). So depression might be seen as a safe response to ‘defeat’ in a hierarchical group because it makes the individual withdraw from conflict while they recover. Mania, conversely, with its expansiveness and increased sexual activity, is proposed as a response to success in a hierarchical tussle promoting the propagation of that individual’s genes. Changes in behaviour that look like depression and hypomania can be clearly seen in primates as they move up and down the pecking order that dominates their lives. The habitual isolation and limited need for social contact of individuals with schizophrenia has been rather imaginatively proposed as adaptive to remote habitats with low food supplies (and also a protection against the risk of infectious diseases and epidemics). Evolutionary psychology will undoubtedly increasingly influence psychiatric thinking – many of our disorders fit poorly into a classical ‘medical model’. Already it has helped establish a less either–or approach to the discussion. It is, however, a highly controversial area – not so much around mental disorders but in relation to social behaviour and particularly to gender specific behaviour. Here it is often interpreted as excusing a very male-orientated, exploitative worldview. Luckily that is someone else’s battle.

The prescribing of stimulants to ADHD youth began to take off in the 1980s, and today, thirty years later, studies have failed to show that this treatment helps children grow up and thrive. In a 2012 op-ed published in the New York Times, Alan Sroufe, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, told of this bottom-line finding: “To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships, or behavior problems, the very things we want to improve…. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

If I had a dollar for every time I felt more emotion for a fictional character than people in real life, I could pay for the Psychiatric help I obviously need.

This was Susan’s second round at boot camp. The only thing that kept her coming back was that it helped her shed what everyone called the ‘Dubai stone’, a whopping 14 pounds. She had gained it since moving to the most glamorous place on earth, with lots of temptation and not too much work. After she and her husband had moved to Dubai, she had decided to take a break from the psychiatric nursing she’d been doing for 13 years.

Because faeces are not drugs, and all you need is a kitchen blender, some saline and a sieve, with a little help from YouTube videos, anyone can administer their own faecal transplant, and many thousands do. Among those giving it a go, not surprisingly, are the parents of autistic children. Dr Borody himself has seen improvements in autistic children following both faecal transplants and after repeatedly delivering faecal microbes via a flavoured drink. His intention was to relieve the gastrointestinal symptoms, not the psychiatric ones, but Borody says several of the children improved following their treatment. The most encouraging was a young child with a vocabulary of just over twenty words, which shot up to around 800 in the weeks after the microbial therapy. For now, all this is anecdotal. As yet not a single clinical trial has been carried out to test the effects of faecal transplant on autistic patients, though some are planned. The lack of evidence won’t stop the parents though – for many, anything is worth a try.

To become a fad, a psychiatric diagnosis requires 3 preconditions: a pressing need, an engaging story, and influential prophets. The pressing need arises from the fact that disturbed and disturbing kids are very often encountered in clinical, school, and correctional settings. They suffered and cause suffering to those around them—making themselves noticeable to families, doctors, and teachers. Everyone feels enormous pressure to do something. Previous diagnoses (especially conduct or oppositional disorder) provided little hope and no call to action. In contrast, a diagnosis or childhood Bipolar Disorder creates a justification for medication and for expanded school services. The medications have broad and nonspecific effects that are often helpful in reducing anger, even if the diagnosis is inaccurate.

Want me to come?” Tod ran his hand up my back, over my shirt. “If you keep her busy, I could convert the filing system from ‘alphabetical’ to ‘most deserving of psychiatric help.’” He leaned closer, and I knew no one else would hear whatever came out of his mouth next. “I’ve been meaning to make some special notations in Nash’s file anyway. Imagine the level of help he could receive if they knew the root of his recent academic decline was a deep-seated fear of the letter Q.” I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And though everyone else at the table looked curious, no one asked what Tod had said. They were finally starting to learn. “Thanks, but it’s hard enough to take grief counseling seriously without you singing ‘Living Dead Girl’ at the top of your lungs behind the counselor’s back.

Inspiration for My Second Novel, Claiming You in Eden: I wanted to write an erotic romance novel that is not just about sexual gratification. I thought there are a lot of women readers out there, and I have come to learn a couple of things during my hospital rotations in reproductive and sexual health clinic, psychiatric hospital, and drug and alcohol units that I wanted to share with them. However, I did not want to share it in a dry exposition, say in a self-help book, and I thought of writing erotic romance novels as a way to educate people through a fun, and interesting medium, albeit an unconventional one. So, I finally decided to try my hands on writing contemporary romance, and as it turned out, I found it much easier to write than fantasy novels.

Studies even suggest that the social misperceptions surrounding psychological and neurological conditions can contribute to their exacerbation, perhaps even prompting a transition in severity to full-scale psychiatric disorders (Corrigan, 2007). The extent to which this impacts individuals diagnosed specifically with ADHD is highly under-investigated, but trends seem to point towards significant repercussions in their social lives. In addition to peer rejections due to perceived “weirdness,” anecdotal evidence appears to suggest that an official diagnosis of ADHD can lead to resentment from the undiagnosed. Furthermore, the effects of courtesy stigma mean that even individuals associated with the person bearing the brunt of a stigma can be negatively impacted, for no other reason than their closeness to the stigmatized person (Mueller et al., 2012).

Even though I never found that antidepressants solved all my problems, they did help some. And even if it is a placebo, the fact that these drugs can make things easier, well, I have to at least give them credit for that. So I don’t feel like it is harmful or wrong or anything to experiment with psychiatric drugs—under a doctor’s supervision, of course.

Armed human beings, officially trained in efficient methods of administering death and violence, should not be dispatched in response to a Black woman experiencing an episode related to a psychiatric disability. She may not only not receive help, but her behavior may well be used as a pretext to kill her. Safety and security require education, housing, jobs, art, music, and recreation.

All drugs have a risk-benefit profile, and the usual thought within medicine is that a drug should provide a benefit that outweighs the risks. A drug that curbs psychotic symptoms clearly provides a marked benefit, and that was why antipsychotics could be viewed as helpful even though the list of negatives with these drugs was a long one. Thorazine and other first-generation neuroleptics caused Parkinsonian symptoms and extraordinarily painful muscle spasms. Patients regularly complained that the drugs turned them into emotional “zombies.” In 1972, researchers concluded that neuroleptics “impaired learning.”30 Others reported that even if medicated patients stayed out of the hospital, they seemed totally unmotivated and socially disengaged. Many lived in “virtual solitude” in group homes, spending most of the time “staring vacantly at television,” wrote one investigator.31 None of this told of medicated schizophrenia patients faring well, and here was the quandary that psychiatry now faced: If the drugs increased relapse rates over the long term, then where was the benefit? This question was made all the more pressing by the fact that many patients maintained on the drugs were developing tardive dyskinesia (TD), a gross motor dysfunction that remained even after the drugs were withdrawn, evidence of permanent brain damage. All of this required psychiatry to recalculate the risks and benefits of antipsychotics, and in 1977 Jonathan Cole did so in an article provocatively titled “Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease?” He reviewed all of the long-term harm the drugs could cause and observed that studies had shown that at least 50 percent of all schizophrenia patients could fare well without the drugs. There was only one moral thing for psychiatry to do: “Every schizophrenic outpatient maintained on antipsychotic medication should have the benefit of an adequate trial without drugs.” This, he explained, would save many “from the dangers of tardive dyskinesia as well as the financial and social burdens of prolonged drug therapy.”32