ianzin, I find your lack of faith in psychopharmacology... disturbing.

The BBQ Pit
61

I very much agree with you here, and I while I never received anything but compassion from the mental health professionals I worked with, I remember a great deal of frustration with my psychiatrist. For the first several months of my treatment she didn’t seem to have a very clear grasp on exactly how miserable I was – when she finally realized that I was spending 25/30 days of each month severely depressed she was horrified, and what followed was a litany of medications. Sometimes they had horrible results and I was off of them within a month-- but sometimes the results were fair, but not perfect–more happy days, depression not as severe. She could not handle this. She kept insisting that there was some magical combination of medication that was going to solve the problem completely. A lifetime of neglect, abuse and instability and she honestly believed that there was some combination of pills that was going to take away my pain forever. Even I knew better than that – even I know, at some level, the pain is always going to be there – and it’s my right to have it there, it is a part of me.

(Kudos to the psychiatrist I had after her, who just sort of looked at me sadly when I reported nightmares/flashbacks and said, ‘‘Yeah, unfortunately medication doesn’t really help with that stuff.’’)

Now I am running into the same problem with my current therapist, who very much wanted me to see a psychiatrist again (I refused) and has been doing EMDR for several months. I was skeptical at first, but the research is coming along, and having done both CBT and EMDR I can assure you the claim that EMDR is CBT with visual stimulii is bullshit. Both deal with transforming negative cognitive patterns, but EMDR has the ability to do it in the course of about 15 minutes. EMDR does something to the brain, I just don’t know what the fuck it does. What disturbs me most of all is that my therapist doesn’t even know what the fuck it does.

So we’ve been working on a particular anxiety issue for me – started out at a level 8/10 in terms of the anxiety it provoked. After just 4 sessions, it’s now down to a level 3. This is not good enough for her. It has be a zero. How realistic is this? And why am I paying someone to feel like I’m doing something wrong, like there’s something wrong with me for experiencing anxiety? I’ve learned to live with my mental disorders as anyone would a chronic illness, and I’ve created quite a joy-filled, exciting, thriving existence for myself, even in the midst of them. But given what I went through for the first 20 years of my life, I don’t think it’s realistic or even necessary that all my neurotic tendencies suddenly vanish. If a man loses a limb in a war, he’s not getting that body part back. He just learns to live without it, and he becomes a stronger and more resourceful person for having to do so. It’s not realistic for the doctor to expect that limb to regenerate any more than it’s realistic for me to not be troubled when I think about my shitty childhood.

So I very much see what you’re saying there.

I’m not sure I would say the claims are lies, but I definitely agree, even as someone who was aided by medication, that the science is inexact. It is a field constantly striving to become more precise and to understand more about the brain, but it’s difficult to figure out.

I don’t think it’s fair to assert that psychotropic meds have been proven to not work, however. I am concerned by the commercial motivation for distributing medications but I don’t think that invalidates the field of psychiatric medicine entirely. For every one study that says they don’t work, there are a hundred that suggest otherwise. I’d be interested in seeing a meta-analysis on this subject.

As the niece of a man who is forced by court-order to receive injections of his antipsychotic medications, I can see where you’re coming at with this. The reason he is made to take medication is to prevent him from being a harm to himself or others (mostly others.) I’m saddened in general by the lack of infrastructure and genuine support available for the deeply mentally ill people in our society–the world, hell, even our family members, to an extent, consider my uncle to be a threat to the general peace, not an actual human being. He knows this and I know this. I’m not sure what the alternative is, though – without medication he is a genuine threat to himself and others. He suffers delusions and paranoia regardless of whether or not he is medicated, though he is a rare case – a lot of schizophrenics respond very positively to medication – the problem is they are resistant to taking it. Schizophrenia is not a very relateable illness, so I can see how empathy would be very difficult for mental health professionals, but come on! My uncle is a human being and it’s traumatic for him, as it would be for any person, to be forced to take medication that has some very real and powerful side effects.

Do you see an alternative to forcibly medicating people like my uncle?

But I’m not sure I follow your point about people who have been voluntarily medicated, such as myself. Are you trying to say that what motivates us to take medicine, and what motivates the mental health industry to prescribe us medication, are two very different things?

I’m also curious about what Mad Pride is.

62

I am not prepared to stick a model out there and say “Fund this and it would definitely make the problem of ‘violent dangerous crazy people’ go away without involuntary treatment of any kind”…

but I’d like to direct your attention to one unusual program that did exist, did get funding (somehow, despite the barriers you can no doubt guess at): The Vancouver Emotional Emergency Center, described here by author Judi Chamberlin (reprinted @ my website with her permission).

I’m severely lacking in additional data (as is most anyone else, we haven’t tried enough stuff like this) but in general my attitude is: fund stuff like this; then aside from voluntary based services of that nature, you do not have the right to lock folks up for the protection of others because of what you think they MIGHT do. Our system does not otherwise permit incarcerating people involuntarily (let alone forcibly interfering with the workings of their brains for god’s sake)
because someone thinks you MIGHT do this or that undesirable thing. Nor is paternalistic protection of people from themselves generally appropriate. The exceptions are already enshrined within statutory law that does not need to reference “mental illness”, and should not be allowed to: competency. The laws that let you place your Aunt Tessie into a nursing home when she gets Alzheimer’s, without her consent, because she would be at risk otherwise, are carefully written so as to minimize the likelihood that you are actually placing elderly but still reasonably sharp millionarie Aunt Tessie into a nursing home so you can administer her fortune. And those protections should exist on the exact same plane in the exact same structure when the alleged reason for wanting to lock someone up involuntarily is that they have bipolar disorder or whatever. We should have the same benefit of being assumed competent until proven otherwise. We should be in front of the same judges, not special judges who do psych commitment hearings on hospital ground. The result would be a greater likelihood that any given raving lunatic fails to be held involuntariy, as a fully acceptable tradeoff for reducing the likelihood of a person with a reasonably functioning mind being shut up and held, often for long periods and sometimes subjected to horrible forced psychiatric treatments like electroshock [yes they DO still do that on an involuntary basis and yes they DO still hold people for years not days, in this day and age, I don’t care WHAT you’ve heard to the contrary].

the Mad Pride movement:
Mad Pride is one of the most modern nomenclatures for the radical wing of the “Network of Mental Health Consumers, Survivors, and Ex-Patients” (often abbreviated C/S/X). We’re a political continuum: the “consumers” end of the spectrum are folks who do seek out and receive psychiatric services. The majority of them do take psychiatric medication. They see the movement as a consumer empowerment movement: the unabridged right to pick our therapist, to retain final say-so about medical decisions on the same basis as consumers of other medical services do, with stress on the importance of being fully informed about all alternatives, and to see decent research money going towards finding better solutions, and to see better funding & therefore better quality support systems with more of them user-run.

The radical end of the spectrum is more emphatic about no forced treatment, about “nothing about us without us”, i.e., if you do not have current or former treatment recipients involved in our group kindly shut up about what’s ‘best for us’, and about combatting what we see as badly distorted data & misinformation which is most of what I’ve been on about in this thread. Most of us fully support the right of pharmaceutical companies to produce the medications, the right of psychiatrists to prescribe them, and the right of patients to take them on a fully informed and fully voluntary basis, but “fully informed” has to be without the bullshit. Be honest about what you do not know. Do not cherry-coat it and pretend to a degree of understanding that the profession does not have. Do not omit mention of the often permanent and often dangerous or debilitating effects of some of these medications. And make sure the folks for whom such treatment is recommended get to hear the voices of those who have received such treatment, positive and negative.
In addition to “Mad Pride” other phrases used have included “Mental Patients Liberation Movement”, “Psychiatric Inmates’ Liberation Movement”, “Insane Liberation Front”, “Schizzy Libbers”, and “Anti-Psychiatric Movement”. (the latter, and variations on it, are not used much because folks confuse us with the damn scientologists, yet another group that opts to speak for us without us, and spouts lotsa bullshit).

Specific organizational names include or have included “Network Against Psychiatric Assault”, “Mental Patients’ Liberation Front”, “On Our Own”, “Mental Patients’ Alliance”, “MindFreedom International”, and hundreds of others, plus an attempt at major national groups a couple decades ago that did not pan out so well.

The radical movement’s members are mostly people who have had very bad and usually coercively imposed experienced with the psychiatric system. Some of us initially became involved due to seeking help for problems we did perceive ourselves as having and then “got burned” and ended up thinking psychiatry itself was worse than what we had sought treatment for. Some of us never considered ourselves to be needing treatment and our sole experience with psychiatric services were experiences of being psychiatric

The radical perspective was for a long long time oriented around a Szaszian attitude: that the stuff they say we have and lock us up for and ‘treat’ us for, these “mental illnesses”, do not exist, any more that the witchcraft for which witches were burned in the middle ages existed.

There has been a shift, more towards there MIGHT be a fundamental physical, physiological, neurological, etc etc difference setting us apart, but if there is, WE and no one else gets to decide that that difference constitutes a “disease” or anything else undesirable; hence “Mad Pride” and “Schizzy Libber” etc, the right to say “I have, or should have, the acknowledged right to live as I am, untreated and uncured and uninterfered-with, except insofar as I break laws that anyone else would be arrested for breaking”. In actual practice many radical folks still think the notion of inherent difference is a crock of shit but recognize that arguing is there or is there not a difference in our brains as opposed to strictly social-emotional circumstance or random happenstance is a waste of time, since even if they are RIGHT, so what? Still gives them no right to force needles upon us, etc.

The radical branch does not always get along well with the consumers: too many consumers think we’re in denial and should be taking our meds, too many radicals thing consumers are poisoning their brains with neurotoxins and are speaking from a drugged fog, etc.; but that’s social movements for you in general, isn’t it? (I’ve come to appreciate more of the ‘consumer’ perspective as a consequence of folks on SDMB such as Zoe and Guinastasia and many many others teaching & challenging me).
Google terms you should check out:

“forced treatment” (phrase)
“mad pride”
“psychiatric assault”
“forced psychiatric treatment”
“leonard roy frank”
“judi chamberlin”
“howie the harp”
“sally zinman”
“laura ziegler”
“george ebert”
“huey freeman”
“janet gotkin”

63

That is such a lame response. I have noticed your posts in the past and found them to be well reasoned and well written. Obviously you have strong feelings about the drug industry and may have some valid points about drugs being over prescribed.

However, Autolycus did not misinterpret your post. You may have meant something different from what you posted, but the words as written are easy to understand. So the “apology accepted” line is just weak. Certainly it your right not to enter this discussion, but “apology accepted” reeks of a smugness that is not warranted.

64

Thank you for that very interesting information, AHunter. Your posts are really challenging me right now to consider the role medication and mental health treatment has played in my life.

My relationship with medication has largely been ambiguous due to the great difficulty I had in finding something that didn’t make the situation worse. I had meds that made me sleep 20 hours a day, I had meds that made me unable to walk in a straight line, I had meds that made me unable to eat without making me violently ill–hell, I had one that temporarily paralyzed half of my face. At best I view them as a necessary evil. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think they can work. And I DO believe that medications helped me, in the end, to get back on my feet, and possibly aided in saving my life.

I also can vouch for feeling misled, misguided, and inappropriately treated as I navigated the mental health system – though I can tell you I have a feeling the problem is much bigger than the mental health industry. I am tired of being patronized and misled by doctors, period.

65

If I didn’t have my Paxil, you wouldn’t have met me - the real me or the fake me or anything. I’d either be dead, or if I was lucky, just a total recluse afraid of communicating with anyone. I would not be able to hold down a job, or have friends, or go to the grocery store, or any number of normal things.

Yeah, I agree psych meds are over prescribed. But for those of us who would be debilitated without them, they are as essential as anesthetic to someone going into surgery - you could live without them somehow, but it’d be a pretty fucking shitty time.

66

Ehr, not always. In some cases, diabetes is not due to the pancreas not producing insulin (or producing defective insulin, which amounts to the same in the end), but to insulin receptors not working correctly. You know, “insulin resistant diabetes.”

I worked for a Big Pharma company for one year but, while it was one year in Hell and I’d love an excuse to flamethrow their main offices, that doesn’t mean I tell my mother to stop taking the stomach-protection pill made by that particular firm. She’s in better health with it than without, therefore as her primary caregiver I’m happy that she has it available. And as it is still under patent protection, there’s no generic form.

There are cases when depression is exogenous and then the only solution is to change your external situation, but there are also others where it’s chemical. Those for whom the cause is internal should be able to get the chemical fix they need. Whether the companies selling them said fix are pigs (with my apologies to pigs) is irrelevant. Whether the doctors treating them are too fast at going for the chemical solution (among other reasons, because “here, try this pill” is faster than “here, try a divorce”) is a separate matter altogether. And for many psychiatric problems there is no such thing as an exogenous origin… if they really are after you, it’s not paranoia therefore it’s not a psychiatric problem.

67

I wish there was more acceptance and explorations of other paths than physho-active drugs.

I spent a good chunk of my life depressed. Sometimes it was pretty bad- even spectacularly bad. I tried SSRIs but stopped taking them for various reasons. Then, after some times, I managed to get to the roots of the problem. I’ve been in great shape for three years without drugs, and I’m confident that I will continue the rest of my life in good health. So, while I believe that drugs are a great solution for some people, I do not believe that they are the only solution. And indeed I think the non-drug solutions have a lot to offer.

One thing that bugs me about drugs is the idea that “you gotta just keep trying till you find the right drug” and that “you’ll probably get depressed again and have to try a new drug”…well yeah. Depression is cyclical. Eventually you are going to feel better (and chances are if you are well enough to seek treatment you are on an upswing) and of course you are going to get depressed again. This isn’t the drugs, this is the depression.

68

I agree with you, even sven. I’ve watched my Mom deal with mental illness for over 30 years. She’s attempted suicide many times - without drugs, she might not have survived, period. But medication has not gotten to the root of her problem, which IMHO comes down to self-acceptance and self-love of a self that’s deeply flawed.

We’re not taught that, on our society; our cultural icons are about overcoming flaws to persevere and limp to the finish line. What about people who simply can’t finish the race (that they always assumed they’d win), because they’re just not good enough? How are they supposed to love that?

My Mom has also been over-medicated at times. Just recently she was released from a hospital stay in a zombie state. I couldn’t believe they put her out the door, to live on her own, operate a car, etc., while she was half-asleep. I complained to her doctors myself, they weren’t bothered in the least, “Oh, it just takes a while to get used to new medications.” Bullshit. They doped her up so that she quit being a problem. What actually happened is she quit being.

It’s also frustrating re: mental illness because there’s no “after care” information for the families. If someone breaks an arm, you get all these pieces of paper about what to expect and how to care for it and what the possible signs of problems are.

People mental illness don’t have that. “Oh, it just takes a while to get used to new medications.” Fuck you, Doc. Fuck you and your ponytail, and your self-congratulatory talk. I’m not impressed.

There ARE a lot of utterly amazing therapists out there, but it’s not easy to find them.

I’m not completely anti-drug, I don’t doubt that there ARE people whose chemistry HAS to be overridden. If someone tells me it’s working for them, I’m not about to argue.

I’ve used SSRI’s a couple of times myself, and I did think it helped. It’s a bridge. But for me, personally, the real problems remained and had to be dealt with.

69

And that’s just fine. I’m not saying that everyone has to try the same remedy or method to cope. Just that there’s NOTHING wrong with using the chemical solution. I just really, REALLY wish the stigma would go away, and people would stop telling me I’m “just popping a pill to deal with life’s problems”, or that I’m “all doped up”.

Just as no one should tell you that you have to take meds, no one should tell me I shouldn’t.

70

If you’re able to participate in a messageboard, you’re not “all doped up.”

71

Well, surely that depends on the message board. Some are devoted to specifically to straight dope, I hear.

72

Well said.

73

I find it excruciating to participate any other way…

74

Yes, I was aware I’d tossed a soft ball on that one :wink: but the reality of one’s mother being … absent … is very sad.

75

I teach Abnormal Psychology in a community college, and arrange to have about a dozen guest speakers come in throughout the semester to discuss their experiences with the various disorders we cover.

And you know what? Not a SINGLE ONE of the people discussing their own disorder is on, or has EVER been on, psychiatric medication.

So, I would really like to know from where this stereotype/meme/myth arises. Is it a continuation of the idea that mental disorders don’t really exist, since we can’t “see” them, and therefore any medication use is a sign of personal weakness?

Granted, I do not have a person with Schizophrenia present their experience, mainly because I have not been able to locate one who would be willing to present. Instead, I have representatives from NAMI Colorado discuss their loved ones’ experiences with Schizophrenia - most of which do involve treatment with psychotropic medication.

But I have people who have diagnoses of OCD, Social Phobia, Major Depressive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Schizoaffective Disorder, and various other major mental illnesses discuss their recovery from their symptoms, and in none of the cases have they taken medication.

So please, can we put to rest the idea that nobody in America ever considers any other psychiatric treatment than medication? Thanks.

76

It’s not that nobody considers other options. But I think you are more likely to catch flack by saying “I am choosing not to take physchiatric medication for my problem” than “I am choosing meds.” I know when I announced my choice here, I got a pretty harsh pitting (granted, I was a little crazy so my post wasn’t that great).

77

I think the problem there, even sven, is that there is still a stigma with mental illness in general.

78

I’ll say.

One of my favorite quotes: “Well if ‘mental illness’ is a ‘disease like any other’, the other disease that it’s like must be venereal disease”

79

Meds - well, meds for depression - aren’t a black/white issue. Some people are prescribed them with no follow-up and would do just as well with straight CBT alone. Some people need them to make effective CBT possible and then can go off them. Some people, like me, will need them everyday for the rest of their lives and have completed CBT successfully.

You can’t say all people should take meds, all people should not take meds, all people should take them short-term, no one should take them short-term.

I do agree, though, that in general only docs that are well-versed should prescribe them and should set some basic expectations. That they are not a panacea. That you will likely experience side-effects. That you should discuss your side-effects with your doctor as a different med may resolve that issue for you. How meds should make you feel (that they aren’t happy pills), and how to know if they are not working. That it is common to have to try several. That you should not go off them cold-turkey, etc.

Most people don’t seem to know what they do and how to use them best for their individual needs. Or if they are a good choice in the first place. It’s ridiculous.

80

I do not think any one really thinks medications are wrong. But we are overmedicating in America. Kids are in line to get Ritalin everyday at schools. Parents accept the advice of teachers and administrators that their kids should be on drugs.
They are not qualified. TV ads push drugs for every real and imagined problem.