Psychiatric Medications Quotes

With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness. - Amy Upham

Ambien might have mentally just tossed my salad. WITH CROUTONS.

If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient?

The power to label is the power to destroy.

And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance". However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally.

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.

Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered.

Prior to being medicated, a depressed person has no known chemical imbalance.

...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)

We have been focusing on the role that psychiatry and its medications may be playing in this epidemic, and the evidence is quite clear. First, by greatly expanding diagnostic boundaries, psychiatry is inviting and ever-greater number of children and adults into the mental illness camp. Second, those so diagnosed are then treated with psychiatric medications that increase the likelihood they will become chronically ill. Many treated with psychotropics end up with new and more severe psychiatric symptoms, physically unwell, and cognitively impaired. This is the tragic story writ large in five decades of scientific literature.

Loose diagnosis is causing a national drug overdose of medication. Six percent of our people are addicted to prescription drugs, and there are now more emergency room visits and deaths due to legal prescription drugs than to illegal street drugs.6

The great unspoken paradox of the arduous process of psychoanalysis is that the best patients are the ones who never really needed it in the first place. Abnormal

That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a "serious mental illness." That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness.

The brain-disease model takes control over people’s fate out of their own hands and puts doctors and insurance companies in charge of fixing their problems. Over the past three decades psychiatric medications have become a mainstay in our culture, with dubious consequences. Consider the case of antidepressants. If they were indeed as effective as we have been led to believe, depression should by now have become a minor issue in our society. Instead, even as antidepressant use continues to increase, it has not made a dent in hospital admissions for depression. The number of people treated for depression has tripled over the past two decades, and one in ten Americans now take antidepressants.24

In 1967, one in three American adults filled a prescription for a “psychoactive” medication, with total sales of such drugs reaching $692 million.

Again and again, psychiatric labels become vehicles for race- and gender-based harm. The use of diagnosis as a tool of structural oppression is not a new phenomenon.

Taking a pill is passive. In contrast, psychotherapy puts the patient in charge by instilling new coping skills and attitudes toward life.

[W]e have far too much faith in pills, far too little trust in resilience, time, and homeostasis.

psychiatric medications have a serious downside, as they may deflect attention from dealing with the underlying issues. The brain-disease

For the past twenty-five years, the psychiatric establishment has told us a false story. It told us that schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar illness are known to be brain diseases, even though—as the MindFreedom hunger strike revealed—it can’t direct us to any scientific studies that document this claim. It told us that psychiatric medications fix chemical imbalances in the brain, even though decades of research failed to find this to be so. It told us that Prozac and the other second-generation psychotropics were much better and safer than the first-generation drugs, even though the clinical studies had shown no such thing. Most important of all, the psychiatric establishment failed to tell us that the drugs worsen long-term outcomes.

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.

Mental disorders should be diagnosed only when the presentation is clear-cut, severe, and clearly not going away on its own. The best way to deal with the everyday problems of living is to solve them directly or to wait them out, not to medicalize them with a psychiatric diagnosis or treat them with a pill.

[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.

We must realize that mental problems are just as real as physical disease, and that anxiety and depression require active therapy as much as appendicitis or pneumonia,” wrote Dr. Howard Rusk, a professor at New York University who penned a weekly column for the New York Times. “They are all medical problems requiring medical care.”12

It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains—that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant. —RICHARD BENTALL, Journal of Medical Ethics, 1992

but it’s not the only diagnosis. Other diagnoses include: hormonal birth control with a “high androgen index” some types of psychiatric medications high prolactin hypothyroidism rare pituitary or adrenal diseases congenital adrenal hyperplasia.

Fracturing of the psyche is said to be conducive to creating the phenomenon that has been termed sleeper assassins. According to such theories, the first psychiatrists employed to master mind control studied mental patients who had been diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, which medical science has since renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. Many of those psychiatrists are said to have been Paperclip Nazi doctors who were brought to the US after conducting radical psychiatric experiments on patients during the Holocaust – the same doctors whose victims not only included Jews, Gyspies, political agitators and homosexuals, but also the mentally ill.

The brain-disease model takes control over people’s fate out of their own hands and puts doctors and insurance companies in charge of fixing their problems. Over the past three decades psychiatric medications have become a mainstay in our culture, with dubious consequences.

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.

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory.

Treatment for DID should adhere to the basic principles of psychotherapy and psychiatric medical management, and therapists should use specialized techniques only as needed to address specific dissociative symptomatology. Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

With a strange logic, [Rod Liddle] asserts that because ME patients deny that they have a psychiatric disorder, this proves they have a psychiatric disorder. Meanwhile, people are quietly dying of ME. ME sufferer Emily Collingridge died, aged 30; Victoria Webster died at just 18. People don’t die from ‘exercise phobia’. ME is not ‘lethargy’ and ‘aches and pains’, as Liddle claims. Severe ME is lying in a darkened room, alone, in agonising pain, tube-fed, catheterised, too weak to move or speak.

...and she no longer is having her emotional responses to...stress numbed by medication. "I've been off the drugs for two years, and sometimes I find it very, very difficult to deal with my emotions. I tend to have these rages of anger. Did the drugs bring such a cloud over my mind, make me so comatose, that I never gained skills on how to deal with my emotions? Now I'm finding myself getting angrier than ever and getting happier than ever too. The circle with my emotions is getting wider. And yes, it's easy to deal with when you're happy, but how do you deal with it when you're mad? I'm working on not getting overly defensive, and trying to take things in stride.

In war it is not just the weak soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly ones, who will break down. Inevitably, all will break down if in combat long enough […] As medical observers have reported, “There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat’ … Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their experience.” Thus – and this is unequivocal: ‘Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare.

Stella Maris Black River Falls, Wisconsin Established 1902 Since 1950 a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients.

Patienthood can become a way of life and rationale for people who are struggling for other reasons.

Time heals so well because many of our ills are short-term, situational, and self-limited - our bodies and our minds are programmed to be resilient without any active effort on our part.

We got through it. Haven made excuses for me to friends, and made an appointment with a terrific doctor, who put me on Effexor, 150 milligrams a day, enough to get my brain straightened out.

Psychotropic drugs have also been organized according to structure (e.g., tricyclic), mechanism (e.g., monoamine, oxidase inhibitor [MAOI]), history (first generation, traditional), uniqueness (e.g., atypical), or indication (e.g., antidepressant). A further problem is that many drugs used to treat medical and neurological conditions are routinely used to treat psychiatric disorders.

It is equally dangerous at either extreme - to have either an expanding concept of mental disorder that eliminates normal or to have an expanding concept of normal that eliminates mental disorder.

You tried so hard to give your kid food that was healthy, she thought. The soy cheese pizza. The organic peas and broccoli and baby carrots. The smoothies. The hormone-free milk. The leafy greens. You kept processed food to a minimum, threw Halloween candy out after a week. Never let him eat the icies they sold in the park, because they had red and yellow dye in them. And then you gave him this?

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.

the difficulties that ravaged the lives of many young African American men of Powell’s ilk: drug and alcohol abuse (or, in his case, self-medication), psychiatric (mis)treatment, and the criminal (in)justice system.

DSM definitions do not include personal and contextual factors such as whether the depressive symptoms are an understandable response to loss, a terrible life situation, psychological conflict or personality factors.

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.

And then, after years of being dismissed as a soft science, talk therapy, too, has seen a reconsideration as studies have shown that for some people, therapy creates profound changes in the brain—as pronounced, in some cases, as psychiatric medication. “Psychotherapy is a biological treatment, a brain therapy,” said Nobel Prize–winning psychiatrist and neuroscientist Eric Kandel in 2013. “It produces lasting, detectable physical changes

[S]ocial order displays not the absolute presence or absence of intolerance to difference but a spectrum of intolerance. Each of us bears responsibility to some degree for maintaining these protocols of intolerance, which could not be kept in place if every single one of us did not play our part. From bringing up children ‘appropriately’, to lovingly correcting or punishing their inappropriate behaviour, to making sure we never breach the protocols ourselves, to staring or sniggering at people who look different, to coercive psychiatric and medical intervention, to emotional blackmail, to physical violence-it’s a range of slippages all the way that we seldom recognize.

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.

The off-drug patients also suffered less from depression, blunted emotions, and retarded movements. Indeed, they told Carpenter and McGlashan that they had found it "gratifying and informative" to have gone through their psychotic episodes without having their feelings numbed by the drugs. Medicated patients didn't have that same learning experience, and as a result Carpenter and McGlashan concluded, over the long term they "are less able to cope with subsequent life stresses.

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.

The thought processes of a man who'd relax with his shoes off, his coat on, were foreign territory to Lech.Then again, the thought processes of Jackson Lamb, as revealed by their subsequent conversation, were probaby terra incognita to the psychiatric profession as a whole.

...the vast majority of these [dissociative identity disorder] patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as posttraumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.2,10 A history of multiple treatment providers, hospitalizations, and good medication trials, many of which result in only partial or no benefit, is often an indicator of dissociative identity disorder or another form of complex PTSD.

Women can get depressed before their period, but PMS is not just depression. Yet PMS is often considered by medical doctors and pharmaceutical companies to be a psychiatric condition suitable for treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as fluoxetine (Prozac, Serafem). But

If there is a medical analogy which applies to psychiatric problems, it is not illness but weakness.While illness can be cured by removing the causative agent, weakness can be cured only by strengthening the existing body to cope with the stress of the world, large or small as this stress may be,

On the National Sleep Foundation website I read, “In the long term, the clinical consequences of sleep deprivation are associated with numerous, serious medical illnesses, including…high blood pressure, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, psychiatric problems, mental impairment, and poor quality of life.”16

Another key feature? Thanks to the commitment and common sense of Dr. Randy Dupont, clinical director of emergency psychiatric services at the University of Tennessee Medical Center and a founding member of the Memphis CIT, if the cops brought someone to the center for an assessment, they were not turned away with some bureaucratic excuse.

ADHD is spreading like wildfire. It used to be confined to a small percentage of kids who had clear-cut problems that started at a very early age and caused them unmistakable difficulties in many situations. Then all manner of classroom disruption was medicalized and ADHD was applied so promiscuously that an amazing 10 percent of kids now qualify.

The Tuskeegee Syphilis Study is relevant to mind control in several ways. It establishes that a large network of doctors and organizations were willing to participate in, fund and condone grossly unethical medical experimentation into the 1970’s. This is the general setting for psychiatric participation in mind control and creation of the Manchurian Candidate.

That question became even more salient to me as I began my clinical work with troubled children. I soon found that the vast majority of my patients had lives filled with chaos, neglect and/or violence. Clearly, these children weren’t “bouncing back”—otherwise they wouldn’t have been taken to a child psychiatry clinic! They’d suffered trauma—such as being raped or witnessing murder—that would have had most psychiatrists considering the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), had they been adults with psychiatric problems. And yet these children were being treated as though their histories of trauma were irrelevant, and they’d “coincidentally” developed symptoms, such as depression or attention problems, that often required medication.

For nearly a hundred years, psychiatry has been striving to apply medical model thinking to psychiatric disorders. In this model, the symptoms besieging patients are sorted into specific disease entities and the causes then identified and removed. For doctors of internal medicine, this works. In the case of diabetes mellitus, for example, the symptoms of urinary frequency, fatigue, and confusion often lead to suspicion of the underlying cause, which is confirmed by blood sugar monitoring and then treated by insulin replacement. But psychiatric symptoms are much harder to sort into diagnoses. People with depression sometimes become paranoid. People with schizophrenia sometimes become depressed. Some people who hear voices have no other symptoms whatsoever, and others who hear voices also fall victim to terrible mood swings. Thus far, the hope that psychiatry would be able to identify homogeneous disease states, uncover the biological underpinnings, and remedy them has been largely a barren one. Kappler's symptoms, however, evolved when the hope for psychiatry's becoming a true medical specialty was bright to the point of being blinding. Over the years he would collect over a dozen diagnoses and cavalierly take a myriad of medicines, but no one would be able to bring him close to confronting the past he had disowned, to stand a chance of making peace with it and, ultimately, overcoming it. (46)

In Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler writes of what she calls “psychiatric imperialism,” whereby normal responses to trauma are methodically pathologized in science and medicine. At the time of the book’s publication in 1972, few women were coming forward about gender biases in the study and practice of psychology. Chesler felt compelled to bring forward a conversation around gender, race, class, and medical ethics because “modern female psychology reflects a relatively powerless and deprived condition.” Of sensitivity she writes: “Many intrinsically valuable female traits, such as intuitiveness or compassion, have probably been developed through default or patriarchal-imposed necessity, rather than through either biological predisposition or free choice. Female emotional ‘talents’ must be viewed in terms of the overall price exacted by sexism.” Regardless of causation, of note here is that women’s internal lives were barely acknowledged or considered.

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.

As far back as 1563 the courageous Dutch physician Johannes Wier published his masterwork, De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Delusions About Demons) in which he states that the collective and voluntary self-accusation of older women through which they exposed themselves to torture and death by their inquisitors was in itself an act inspired by the devil, a trick of demons, whose aim it was to doom not only the innocent women but also their reckless judges. Wier was the first medical man to introduce what became the psychiatric concept of DELUSION and mental blindness. Wherever his book had influence, the persecution of witches ceased, in some countries more than one hundred and fifty years before it was finally brought to an end throughout the civilized world. His work and his insights became one of the main instruments for fighting the witch delusion and physical torture (Baschwitz). Wier realized even then that witches were scapegoats for the inner confusion and desperation of their judges and of the “Zeitgeist” in general.

Of course, to speak of the dark night of the soul is anathema to many in the psychiatric field. I was told by one of my psychiatrists over the years not to equate depression with any religious experience such as the dark night of the soul. I never asked him why; I just assumed that he didn't want religious language to be mixed with medical. I did try to tell him, however, that religious language covers all and every aspect of being, that I could not simply separate it from his profession's language and concepts. He looked disgusted.

Medications used to treat psychiatric disorders are commonly referred to as psychotropic drugs. These drugs are commonly described by their major clinical application, for example, antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, anxiolytics, hypnotics, cognitive enhancers, and stimulants. A problem with this approach is that these drugs have multiple indicators. For example, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRls) are both antidepressants and anxiolytics, and the serotonin-dopamine antagonists (SDAs) are both anxiolytics and mood stabilizers.

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.

What is considered pathology is largely a construct and product of the times. Mental health specialists spend their careers carving out the precise parameters around certain “diagnoses,” and when two or more diagnoses start to overlap or run up against each other, people get territorial and defensive and protective. This may sound shocking or ridiculous, but it is true. So it is imperative that the language and vocabulary of neurodiversity—the understanding that there is a natural array of human brain makeups—begin to seep not only into the medical and psychiatric canon, but also into the everyday colloquial language of the public. We must ask, Why does the way you pay attention determine your work prospects and life satisfaction?

This new marketplace for drugs proved profitable for all involved. Drug industry revenues topped $1 billion in 1957, the pharmaceutical companies enjoying earnings that made them “the darlings of Wall Street,” one writer observed.19 Now that physicians controlled access to antibiotics and all other prescription drugs, their incomes began to climb rapidly, doubling from 1950 to 1970 (after adjusting for inflation). The AMA’s revenues from drug advertisements in its journals rose from $2.5 million in 1950 to $10 million in 1960, and not surprisingly, these advertisements painted a rosy picture. A 1959 review of drugs in six major medical journals found that 89 percent of the ads provided no information about the drugs’ side effects.20

While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decisions that affect us. There is no true responsibility without awareness. One of the weaknesses of the Western medical approach is that we have made the physician the only authority, with the patient too often a mere recipient of the treatment or cure. People are deprived of the opportunity to become truly responsible. None of us are to be blamed if we succumb to illness and death. Any one of us might succumb at any time, but the more we can learn about ourselves, the less prone we are to become passive victims. Mind and body links have to be seen not only for our understanding of illness but also for our understanding of health. Dr. Robert Maunder, on the psychiatric faculty of the University of Toronto, has written about the mindbody interface in disease. “Trying to identify and to answer the question of stress,” he said to me in an interview, “is more likely to lead to health than ignoring the question.” In healing, every bit of information, every piece of the truth, may be crucial. If a link exists between emotions and physiology, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool. And here we confront the inadequacy of language. Even to speak about links between mind and body is to imply that two discrete entities are somehow connected to each other. Yet in life there is no such separation; there is no body that is not mind, no mind that is not body. The word mindbody has been suggested to convey the real state of things. Not even in the West is mind-body thinking completely new. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates quotes a Thracian doctor’s criticism of his Greek colleagues: “This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.” You cannot split mind from body, said Socrates—nearly two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology!

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud’s own views on ‘normality’ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud’s work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic’ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm’; but this is in no sense given by Nature.

It is necessary to make this point in answer to the `iatrogenic' theory that the unveiling of repressed memories in MPD sufferers, paranoids and schizophrenics can be created in analysis; a fabrication of the doctor—patient relationship. According to Dr Ross, this theory, a sort of psychiatric ping-pong 'has never been stated in print in a complete and clearly argued way'. My case endorses Dr Ross's assertions. My memories were coming back to me in fragments and flashbacks long before I began therapy. Indications of that abuse, ritual or otherwise, can be found in my medical records and in notebooks and poems dating back before Adele Armstrong and Jo Lewin entered my life. There have been a number of cases in recent years where the police have charged groups of people with subjecting children to so-called satanic or ritual abuse in paedophile rings. Few cases result in a conviction. But that is not proof that the abuse didn't take place, and the police must have been very certain of the evidence to have brought the cases to court in the first place. The abuse happens. I know it happens. Girls in psychiatric units don't always talk to the shrinks, but they need to talk and they talk to each other. As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept. (Alice refers to her constant infections as a child, which were never recognised as caused by sexual abuse)

Even seemingly simple scenarios of genetic screening force us to enter arenas of unnerving moral hazard. Take Friedman’s example of using a blood test to screen soldiers for genes that predispose to PTSD. At first glance, such a strategy would seem to mitigate the trauma of war: soldiers incapable of “fear extinction” might be screened and treated with intensive psychiatric therapies or medical therapies to return them to normalcy. But what if, extending the logic, we screen soldiers for PTSD risk before deployment? Would that really be desirable? Do we truly want to select soldiers incapable of registering trauma, or genetically “augmented” with the capacity to extinguish the psychic anguish of violence? Such a form of screening would seem to me to be precisely undesirable: a mind incapable of “fear extinction” is exactly the dangerous sort of mind to be avoided in war.

The issues of antidepressant-associated suicide has become front-page news, the result of an analysis suggesting a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, a link between medication use and suicidal ideation among children, adolescents, and adults up to age 24 in short term (4 to 16 weeks), placebo-controlled trials of nine newer antidepressant drugs. The data from trials involving more than 4.4(K) patients suggested that the average risk of suicidal thinking or behavior (suicidality) during the first few months of treatment in those receiving antidepressants was 4 percent, twice the placebo risk of 2 percent. No suicides occured in these trials. The analysis also showed no increase in suicide risk among the 25 to 65 age group. Antidepressants reduced suicidality among those over age 65. Following public hearings on the subject, in October 2004, the FDA requested the addition of “black box” warnings—the most serious warning placed on the labeling of a prescription medication—to all antidepressant drugs, old and new.

Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate.

If you can imagine this, perhaps you can understand that someone from another planet who came to visit us would have a similar experience with humans. But it isn’t our skin that is full of wounds. What the visitor would discover is that the human mind is sick with a disease called fear. Just like the description of the infected skin, the emotional body is full of wounds, and these wounds are infected with emotional poison. The manifestation of the disease of fear is anger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all the emotions that make humans suffer. All humans are mentally sick with the same disease. We can even say that this world is a mental hospital. But this mental disease has been in this world for thousands of years, and the medical books, the psychiatric books, and the psychology books describe the disease as normal. They consider it normal, but I can tell you it is not normal. When the fear becomes too great, the reasoning mind starts to fail and can no longer take all those wounds with all the poison. In the psychology books we call this a mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, but these diseases are created when the reasoning mind is so frightened and the wounds so painful, that it becomes better to break contact with the outside world. Humans live in continuous fear of being hurt, and this creates a big drama wherever we go. The way humans relate to each other is so emotionally painful that for no apparent reason we get angry, jealous, envious, sad. To even say “I love you” can be frightening. But even if it’s painful and fearful to have an emotional interaction, still we keep going, we enter into a relationship, we get married, and we have children. In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt, humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system. In that denial system we become the perfect liars. We lie so perfectly that we lie to ourselves and we even believe our own lies. We don’t notice we are lying, and sometimes even when we know we are lying, we justify the lie and excuse the lie to protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.

In studies of first-episode bipolar patients, investigators at McLean Hospital, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Cincinnati Hospital found that at least one-third had used marijuana or some other illegal drug prior to their first manic or psychotic episode.10 This substance abuse, the University of Cincinnati investigators concluded, may “initiate progressively more severe affective responses, culminating in manic or depressive episodes, that then become self-perpetuating.”11 Even the one-third figure may be low; in 2008, researchers at Mt. Sinai Medical School reported that nearly two-thirds of the bipolar patients hospitalized at Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut in 2005 and 2006 experienced their first bout of “mood instability” after they had abused illicit drugs.12 Stimulants, cocaine, marijuana, and hallucinogens were common culprits. In 2007, Dutch investigators reported that marijuana use “is associated with a fivefold increase in the risk of a first diagnosis of bipolar disorder” and that one-third of new bipolar cases in the Netherlands resulted from it.13

found myself constantly drawn to the subject of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), which I have concluded is inextricably linked to psychopathy, although this link is rarely mentioned in medical papers or among the psychiatric profession generally. As with psychopathy, people with NPD make up approximately 1 per cent of the population with rates greater in men. Another direct comparison between those suffering with NPD and psychopathy/sociopathy is that both types are characterised by exaggerated feelings of self-importance. In its moderate to extreme forms these people are excessively preoccupied with personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity; mentally unable to see the destructive damage they are causing themselves and others. Symptoms of the NPD disorder include seeking constant approval from others who are successful in positions of power in whatever form it may be. Many are selfish, grandiose pathological liars; their egos and sense of self-esteem over-inflated, while at once they are torn between exaggerated self-appraisal and the reality that they might never amount to much.

If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board. What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.

One year later the society claimed victory in another case which again did not fit within the parameters of the syndrome, nor did the court find on the issue. Fiona Reay, a 33 year old care assistant, accused her father of systematic sexual abuse during her childhood. The facts of her childhood were not in dispute: she had run away from home on a number of occasions and there was evidence that she had never been enrolled in secondary school. Her father said it was because she was ‘young and stupid’. He had physically assaulted Fiona on a number of occasions, one of which occurred when she was sixteen. The police had been called to the house by her boyfriend; after he had dropped her home, he heard her screaming as her father beat her with a dog chain. As before there was no evidence of repression of memory in this case. Fiona Reay had been telling the same story to different health professionals for years. Her medical records document her consistent reference to family problems from the age of 14. She finally made a clear statement in 1982 when she asked a gynaecologist if her need for a hysterectomy could be related to the fact that she had been sexually abused by her father. Five years later she was admitted to psychiatric hospital stating that one of the precipitant factors causing her breakdown had been an unexpected visit from her father. She found him stroking her daughter. There had been no therapy, no regression and no hypnosis prior to the allegations being made public. The jury took 27 minutes to find Fiona Reay’s father not guilty of rape and indecent assault. As before, the court did not hear evidence from expert witnesses stating that Fiona was suffering from false memory syndrome. The only suggestion of this was by the defence counsel, Toby Hed­worth. In his closing remarks he referred to the ‘worrying phenomenon of people coming to believe in phantom memories’. The next case which was claimed as a triumph for false memory was heard in March 1995. A father was aquitted of raping his daughter. The claims of the BFMS followed the familiar pattern of not fitting within the parameters of false memory at all. The daughter made the allegations to staff members whom she had befriended during her stay in psychiatric hospital. As before there was no evidence of memory repression or recovery during therapy and again the case failed due to lack of corrobo­rating evidence. Yet the society picked up on the defence solicitor’s statements that the daughter was a prone to ‘fantasise’ about sexual matters and had been sexually promiscuous with other patients in the hospital. ~ Trouble and Strife, Issues 37-43

As many speakers noted, this tool wasn’t particularly well suited for assessing outcomes of a psychiatric drug. How could a study of a neuroleptic possibly be “double-blind”? The psychiatrist would quickly see who was on the drug and who was not, and any patient given Thorazine would know he was on a medication as well. Then there was the problem of diagnosis: How would a researcher know if the patients randomized into a trial really had “schizophrenia”? The diagnostic boundaries of mental disorders were forever changing. Equally problematic, what defined a “good outcome”? Psychiatrists and hospital staff might want to see drug-induced behavioral changes that made the patient “more socially acceptable” but weren’t to the “ultimate benefit of the patient,” said one conference speaker.11 And how could outcomes be measured? In a study of a drug for a known disease, mortality rates or laboratory results could serve as objective measures of whether a treatment worked. For instance, to test whether a drug for tuberculosis was effective, an X-ray of the lung could show whether the bacillus that caused the disease was gone. What would be the measurable endpoint in a trial of a drug for schizophrenia? The problem, said NIMH physician Edward Evarts at the conference, was that “the goals of therapy in schizophrenia, short of getting the patient ‘well,’ have not been clearly defined.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

In “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Charles Seife ferrets out doctors’ financial ties to pharma companies; in “Studying Drugs in All the Wrong People,” Gabriella Rosen breaks down why drug trials for psychiatric medications might be doing more harm than good to the people that need these

If you are a parent trying to determine if psychiatric medications are appropriate for your child, remember one thing: Most of these drugs have not been tested on and are, therefore, not approved to be used in children under the age of eighteen. Many may escalate your child’s emotional issues. Children require love, attention, nurturing, and healthy boundaries to feel emotionally secure and well- adjusted. Even if the drugs manage to restrain or numb their feelings and behavior, if the root of their origin is not addressed, they will soon return, often with a vengeance, once the drugs are removed.

episodes are due to psychiatric illness, and the nature of the episodes is often embarrassing. A potentially violent or injurious episode often leads to evaluation. Yet effective medical treatments are now available—actually a number of them—such as medication and hypnosis. The key is finding a sleep medicine professional experienced in the diagnosis and management of sleepwalking and sleep terrors. Sleepwalking and sleep terrors affected every part of Ms. Frazier’s life. They put her safety, her very life, at risk and threatened the safety of those close to her. Sleepwalker: The Mysterious Makings and Recovery of a Somnambulist is an accurate

The critics cite malpractice suits as evidence that DID treatment is harmful (e.g., McHugh, 2013). There have been malpractice suits for treatments of most major psychiatric and medical disorders. If a plaintiff wins in a lawsuit against a clinician for malpractice, it does not follow that the established treatment model itself is at fault. Rather, the judgment is that the treatment fell below the standard of care. All treatments, including those for DID, should be consistent with the current standard of care. It is illogical to conclude that because a few therapists have failed to do this for individual DID patients, all DID treatment is harmful.

Nature abhors homogeneity and simply adores eccentric diversity.

On the other hand, I can tell you, both from extensive research and from firsthand experience, that as convincing as the case made by Lane and his fellow Antipharma critics can be, the distress felt by some social phonics is real and intense. Are there some 'normally' shy people, not mentally ill or in need of psychiatric attention, who get swept up in the broad diagnostic category of social anxiety disorder, which has been swollen by the profit-seeking imperatives of the drug companies? Surely. But are there also socially anxious people who can legitimately benefit from medication and other forms of psychiatric treatment- who in some cases are saved by medication from alcoholism, despair, and suicide? I think there are.

Gottlieb told the meeting he was convinced that “successful brainwashing” was rooted in the use of drugs: LSD, mescaline, cocaine, or even nicotine. He did not yet know which one — “but it had to be something like that.” He reminded them that all over the United States in research centers — Boston Psychiatric; the University of Illinois Medical School, Mount Sinai and Columbia University in New York, the University of Oklahoma, the Addiction Research Center at Lexington, Kentucky, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, among others — researchers were running projects funded by the CIA to try to prove his theory.

Psychologists are bound by an ethical code not to discuss their patients, unless a patient poses a serious threat to his own life or the lives of others. I was allowed to read his file. There appeared to be no medical or psychiatric problems with our suspect. I was reminded of the Station Strangler, who booked himself into hospital just before or after a murder.

Labels can also create self-fulfilling prophecies. If you are told you are sick, you feel and act sick, and others treat you as if you are sick.

As a society, however, we have become victim to the demands of insurers, who often require justification for every day (if not every hour) of hospitalization, and hospitals in turn encourage, reward, and publicize their ever-shrinking lengths of stay. By this standard, keeping a patient in a hospital for days or weeks longer than would be necessary if they could simply be forced to take medications is unacceptable.

It is appropriate to designate Freud as the grandfather of psychosomatic medicine since his genius introduced us to the world of the unconscious mind, a contribution to medical science of inestimable importance. Psychosomatic processes begin in the unconscious and, though it has yet to be widely appreciated by either physical or psychiatric medicine, unconscious emotions are a potent factor in virtually all physical ills.

The psychiatric endeavor—voodoo, really—is premised on the medicalization of misconduct.

While all of us dread being blamed, we all would wish to be more responsible—that is, to have the ability to respond with awareness to the circumstances of our lives rather than just reacting. We want to be the authoritative person in our own lives: in charge, able to make the authentic decisions that affect us. There is no true responsibility without awareness. One of the weaknesses of the Western medical approach is that we have made the physician the only authority, with the patient too often a mere recipient of the treatment or cure. People are deprived of the opportunity to become truly responsible. None of us are to be blamed if we succumb to illness and death. Any one of us might succumb at any time, but the more we can learn about ourselves, the less prone we are to become passive victims. Mind and body links have to be seen not only for our understanding of illness but also for our understanding of health. Dr. Robert Maunder, on the psychiatric faculty of the University of Toronto, has written about the mindbody interface in disease. “Trying to identify and to answer the question of stress,” he said to me in an interview, “is more likely to lead to health than ignoring the question.” In healing, every bit of information, every piece of the truth, may be crucial. If a link exists between emotions and physiology, not to inform people of it will deprive them of a powerful tool. And here we confront the inadequacy of language. Even to speak about links between mind and body is to imply that two discrete entities are somehow connected to each other. Yet in life there is no such separation; there is no body that is not mind, no mind that is not body. The word mindbody has been suggested to convey the real state of things. Not even in the West is mind-body thinking completely new. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates quotes a Thracian doctor’s criticism of his Greek colleagues: “This is the reason why the cure of so many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas; they are ignorant of the whole. For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of the human body, that physicians separate the mind from the body.” You cannot split mind from body, said Socrates—nearly two and a half millennia before the advent of psychoneuroimmunoendocrinology!

The type of review book you need while attending school should be separated into four or five subject areas. These main sections are medical-surgical, pediatrics, psychiatric, obstetrics, and sometimes a fifth topic called community health. The

Until fairly recently, there has been precious little research on expectant fathers’ emotional and psychological experiences during pregnancy. The very title of one of the first articles to appear on the subject should give you some idea of the medical and psychiatric communities’ attitude toward the impact of pregnancy on men. Written by William H. Wainwright, M.D., and published in the July 1966 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, it was called “Fatherhood as a Precipitant of Mental Illness.” (Another wonderful title that came out at about the same time was: “Psychoses in Males in Relation to Their Wives’ Pregnancy and Childbirth.”)

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.

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.

Caught between taking the suffering of their soldiers seriously and pursuing victory over the Germans, the British General Staff issued General Routine Order Number 2384 in June of 1917, which stated, “In no circumstances whatever will the expression ‘shell shock’ be used verbally or be recorded in any regimental or other casualty report, or any hospital or other medical document.” All soldiers with psychiatric problems were to be given a single diagnosis of “NYDN” (Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous).

You're not going to get patients to take medications unless they trust you. Everyone may have the best of intentions, but if you drag someone to a place, then hand them a bunch of pills, they may get agitated and combative and end up being injected. And then the damage is done.