You can see by my name, that I feel that 90% of my mental illness was actually caused by the drugs that were supposed to fix me.
If I put my brain cap on, ill tell you the brain damage I have being a schizophrenic is caused by->
acuphase chemical shock treatment. (thats real good for you.)
electro shock treatment. (lost a few braincells there.)
depot and depot after depot of slow release chemical dopemine antagonists. (doesnt cause brain damage)
You get my drift?
Dopamine agonists like ampethamines can trigger schizophrenia (usually temporary), but I don’t know if antipsychotics can do it.
time and time again, youll catch a scientist blaming a schizpohrenic to be born with something the antipsychotics did to him. (debilitation.)
Its an easy mistake to make.
No. Get back on your medications before you harm yourself or somebody else.
No. I suspect you’ve been reading Whitaker to either form or bolster your opinion. But the studies which he’s used in his antipsychiatry pieces were fundamentally flawed. The first group of studies (Harrow, in the Netherlands) because there was no randomization of groups - people either chose to take medication or not. It’s very probable that those who chose not to take medication were those with less severe symptoms in the first place. It’s also possible that they would have done even better had they been taking their medications. The more recent study (Wunderink) did randomize groups, but then the treatment was altered by doctors as the person’s symptoms waxed and waned, so many of the people in the “unmedicated” group were medicated, and many of the people in the “medicated” group found their dose reduced as their symptoms eased up. It was such a mess that I’m amazed it even got published.
I’m absolutely willing to believe that every patient needs an individualized treatment plan, and adjustment to that plan needs to be frequent based on their response to the treatment and the severity of their symptoms. Schizophrenia is most likely not a single disease process, but a constellation of diseases that we call Schizophrenia. Some people have it worse than others. So a one-size-fits-all medication regimen based only on diagnostic label is decidedly inappropriate. But that means frequent doctor’s visits, reports from family members and friends and, most difficultly, cooperation from the patient are required. If your wife/mother/sister/friend says your symptoms are getting worse, you have to believe them, tell your doctor, and take the medication. Unfortunately, this is really hard for many people with Schizophrenia to do. So they get left on this long term maybe too high dose regimen, because we’re all scared that if we reduce the dose or they stop, they won’t start again when it’s needed.
Broken brains are difficult to fix, because the body part needed for good decision making is broken. That’s why mental health is so irritatingly paternalistic. Someone else has to do your thinking for you until your brain works again.
No, its all my own thinking, but this Whitaker guy is sounding like a genius to me. Just because of what side he was on.
I swear by my own experience, that my head only became ill after being on the depot injections for a long time, when I first went schizo, my head felt fine.
I was scared shitless of the doctors, they didnt know why i felt so frightened, not even you do, because you dont know what happened to my brain.
The illness of bad feelings in my head are caused by the antipsychotics, and the mental institution is a scab on society ruining childrens lives, day in day out, pregnant or not, motivated or nonmotivated.
You can come up with a million reasons why antipsychotics help society, and we can come up with as million idiotic falible experiments on our side, but either way no matter how useless the reasoning was, either us are right, you yous are right.
And I think we are right, for the very basic reason - that they are absolutely fucking weed killer to your brain, and its so damn obvious, and just look at a schizo march, and youll see all of them are completely braindamaged. and you wonder why?
If you had ‘schizo’, before taking meds, as you say, it kind of defeats your theory, don’t ya think?
I have a nephew with such a diagnosis, his meds have helped him enormously get back to a normal life. Didn’t stop him being convinced of the same as you, in the beginning.
How can you admit your brain chemistry is malfunctioning and at the same time think that your thoughts on this are clear and reasoned?
This is what’s known as “confirmation bias”, so it’s probably something you should take with a grain of salt.
Salt? If this weren’t something serious I’d crack a joke about medicating with salt, though sometimes one needs to get ones electrolytes in order.
lab experiment for a brain, why were you given those drugs and other treatments in the first place? It’s not like doctors prescribe ECT willy-nilly these days.
Antipsychotics do permanent brain damage to varying degrees and, furthermore, they create neurological dependence on the antipsychotic chemical.
I was also diagnosed schizophrenic. I don’t take the stuff.
What do you base this upon? The permanent brain damage? I thought it was the “walking around half asleep and out of it” effect that makes most people who take anti-psychotics not like taking anti-psychotics? Is the brain damage component accepted by medical science? If it is accepted, do they think people would be worse without it?
I’m really sorry you are having a hard time. I hope that things work out for you and that however you decide to handle things I wish you good luck.
head feels really bad when i try and come off the antipsychotics, which i am doing now, and I think it was being on the antipsychotics which did it to me. :smack:
I think its going to be a couple of years to get off them, unless they put me on them again, and just make it all a waste of time.
Why were you put on the meds and treatments if you didn’t have schizophrenia to begin with?
I’m actually kind of curious not being hostile.
To my knowledge, no, it is not accepted by medical science that antipsychotics cause brain damage (as in neuronal grey matter or non-neuronal white matter death). Certain antipsychotic agents, most notably the first generation or conventional or “typical” antipsychotics, have a strong association with the development of a secondary condition called a tardive dyskinesia, which can be permanent (or at the very least, very long lasting), but that’s probably more due to changes in the interactions between certain neuronal networks than it is to actual damage.
The problem with schizophrenia and the drugs we use to treat it is that the antipsychotics work very well (if dosed appropriately) at arresting the positive symptoms of schizophrenia which include hallucinations, delusions, exaggerations/disorganized language/speech, and motor disturbances but frequently do nothing for, or actually worsen the negative symptoms such as affective/emotional blunting, decreased social drive (asociality), decreased pleasure (anhedonia), restricted/blunted productivity of thought and speech (alogia), and reduced desire, motivation, or persistence (avolition). The conventional/typical antipsychotics in particular tend to worsen the negative symptoms, which is why they’ve largely fallen out of favor, being replaced by the atypical antipsychotics, which are generally much better tolerated.
The current mechanism for why this is so is because all antipsychotics are either antagonists or partial agonists at D2 receptors, and the current thinking is that secondary to some problems in glutamate signaling, too much dopamine is released in one part of the brain (i.e., the striatum) and too little in another (i.e., the prefrontal cortex). Thus, antipsychotics work well at blocking the excessive dopamine in certain regions, but at the cost of also blocking receptors in other parts of the brain responsible for some of the negative symptoms. The atypical antipsychotics are better tolerated, because they have other mechanisms besides D2-blocking which serve to counterbalance the blockade of D2 in regions with low dopamine release (such as 5-HT2C antagonism in one region resulting in downstream increases in norepinephrine and dopamine in the prefrontal cortex) without doing so in regions with too much dopamine. The trick is, of course, to get the right agent(s) to help with, or at least not worsen, the negative symptoms without sacrificing the effective blockade of positive symptoms, and that’s unfortunately still more art than science, and takes time to figure out.
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/antipsychotics-and-shrinking-brain
They can also cause TD which can become permanent.
Some medication can cause withdrawal systems if you quit them cold turkey, but that still doesn’t mean they cause schizophrenia.
I wouldnt be withdrawing if I didnt start them.
Its as if theyve decided who an intelligent person is, and they try to mould you around him, but I think is a dull witted afternoon drived boring idiot.
Im a creative person, but I dont think thats a product of dyskenesia or whatever you said, like I read once it causes creativity.
I doubt the whole lot, and are you guys black? what with this “straight dope” titling?
You guys make fantastic dull witted afternoon driven psychiatrists! Why dont you examine your neurotransmitters tell everyone about it so they can misinterpret you and agree, and then go pelt out the same old bullshit story about the moronic brain farts in your head.
Snap out of it. You smell like mcdonalds and you dont even know it.
I kinda like the smell of McDonalds. The fryer odor along with cooking meat. Mmm.
Um, wha? 