This statement makes it obvious that you’ve done absolutely zero research on this topic, and are just spouting whatever sounds good to support your position.
If you’d like to actually learn something, I suggest you go here and start reading.
Nope, I just have an endocrine disorder. That makes me ill. You did say “I want to treat him like someone who is ill. Period.” Not “like someone who is ill with a contagious disease” or “like someone who is ill and poses a health risk to others”. “Ill” was the specific and unqualified term you used. So either you think all ill people should have medication forced upon them and be locked away if they try to resist, regardless of the type or severity of their disease, or you don’t actually want to treat schizophrenics like other ill people.
*You do know what the word “all” means, don’t you? It means “everyone”, not “everyone except the person who actually wrote the post I am replying to”. You might find communication easier if you could try to remember that words don’t just mean whatever you want them to mean at the moment.
*How do you know that it’s a fact that he’s ill? AHunter3 has given me no reason to doubt his honesty, but I haven’t seen his medical records and it’s possible that his account of events is not entirely accurate. Or perhaps the psychiatrist who made the original diagnosis was in error. I’m not willing to play doctor or start telling strangers what treatment they must undergo based solely on their limited remarks on the Internet about their past medical history. If you are, you’re more a threat to public health than the average schizophrenic.
*I am? Funny, I hadn’t noticed. Are you sure you aren’t suffering from paranoid delusions again?
*From my first post in this thread:
Prove that medication will improve AHunter3’s quality of life, and I’ll agree that he should take it. I may not agree that it should be forced on him for his own good, but I’ll certainly agree that taking it would be the right thing for him to do. But you can’t prove any such thing, can you? You don’t have any idea what the best course of treatment would be in this particular case, or if any treatment is necessary at all. You simply do not have the information or expertise needed to make that call.
laigle, your statements here demonstrate a profound ignorance of the principles of medicine in general and psychiatry in specific.
In medicine, the principle is “first, do no harm”. We determine if the severity of the illness merits treatment, as treatment has a potential for harm also. This is done individually, on a case by case basis.
Forcing all people to have treatment based merely on a diagnosis violates this first principle.
QtM, MD
Well, since it’s become more fun to troll at me instead of to discuss the topic, I’m bowing out. Do have fun.
Guinastasia, astro, and others reading this thread:
As I have already said, I can’t ever get a lab test and prove I was misdiagnosed. There is no such thing as a psychiatric clean bill of health. At best I might obtain a diagnosis of “schizophrenia in remission”. Mind you, I am most definitely not claiming that I was misdiagnosed, but supposing for the moment, for the sake of argument, that I was – is there any meaningful way for me to differentiate that circumstance from that of a person who, as I’m certain laigle would put it, and as literally dozens of mental health professionals have put it to me and others with a similar diagnostic history, "are too sick to see how sick they are, and their lack of insight into their own sickness just goes to demonstrate the extent of their divorce from reality:?
Can’t. The attitude and statements of laigle are entirely commonplace and accorded an enormous amount of legitimacy within the mental health system. Right now, if I were to act in a fashion that distressed people and provoked even momentary consideration of the barest possibility that I was having some kind of mental breakdown, and police or psychiatric professionals became involved and had access to the fact that I have a psychiatric history – bang, I’m a “mentally ill person who is too sick to know that he needs psychiatric treatment and on that basis alone is a danger to himself and/or other people and therefore needs to be involuntarily detained and medicated”.
Do you see that? Do you understand how futile and useless and ineffective it is and would be for me to try to draw any attention to any of these issues from a starting point of “I’m not really mentally ill, they misdiagnosed me and all this terrible shit happened to me, and I’m at risk of being revictimized” – ??
But even if you grant all that, even if you’re nodding by this point, perhaps you are thinking, “Yeah, but AHunter3, surely most of the people who get a psych diagnosis are, you know, out of touch with reality and unable to do abstract reasoning and do things like posit the possiblity that they are nuts long enough to argue that they aren’t, and therefore what applies to you doesn’t necessarily apply to the genuinely psychotic paranoid schizophrenic mentally ill, or at least doesn’t apply in the same way.”
Um. Well, I don’t know if this makes the whole deal more Kafkaesque or less so, but the truth of the matter is that on the occasions when I’ve been on the locked ward as an involuntary resident, the other people there weren’t dramatically different from me. A continuum, sure, but plenty of folks who could sign up for and participate on this board and not stand out as unusually nutty or unfocused. Plenty of folks who could attend Dopefests in person with the same results. Plenty of folks who could work at your place of employment or attend and participate in your college courses and not strike you as being wrong-in-the-head. Which means, inversely, that it could happen to you. Yes, you. Don’t kid yourself that it couldn’t.
They don’t have to find schizophrenerase proteins in your bloodstream or discover paranotic breakdown products in your urine. All that has to happen is that a psychiatrist, in an institution at risk of bad publicity and possible lawsuits if they say you’re OK and release you only to have you do something violent, decides that your behavior – as reported by people who could be your neighbors, employers, coworkers, ex-spouses, parents, children, dorm supervisors, private condominium security chiefs, or whatever – is sufficiently similar to what he or she thinks of as “symptomatic of mental illness”, or sufficiently troubling in and of themselves, to warrant holding you and writing something on the line for diagnostic criterion. They aren’t required to observe any of these troubling behaviors themselves. (But your reaction to being held can sure be added to the list as confirmation. I’m not sure what reaction they think of as “how a non-psychotic person would react to being held as mentallly ill and dangerous”, but it isn’t freaking out and it isn’t being calm and accepting it, I can tell you that much.)
If “you are mentally ill” is viewed as a fact, then anything you do to challenge it is an illustration that you deny facts. Ain’t that convenient and cute?
No need to bust liagle’s chops. Not for demonstrating right here in front of you the very reason we feel the need for a political civil rights movement for lunatics. If you’re inclined to dislike what you hear from liagle, come join us in confronting the psychiatric establishment for embodying the very same attitudes and implementing them in their policies.
I’m not saying you aren’t schizophrenic, or that you are, even. Just that you seem to cope very well, or else it doesn’t seem to affect you as badly. Maybe it’s just we all hear the horror stories of people with schizophrenia who aren’t on meds and such. (I think I’ve watched enough ER and Law & Order to give me that impression!)
Again, I want to ask, is there research being done, to try and find treatment that would NOT result in being drugged up, as it seems currently? Because I have an anxiety disorder (of course, neurosis is different from a psychosis), and am on meds, and all they allow me to do is function as I would WITHOUT my anxiety disorder.
So, will there, someday, perhaps be away to do this with schizophrenia-a person could live without the horrible symptoms of this disorder?
A schizophrenic can sit here and type on a computer pretty freely. You have time to collect your thoughts, the paranoia isn’t (always) there. I actually feel quite safe locked in my room. The thing about schizophrenia is that you can seem OK some of the time.
For me, I am only affected when I’m around people.
Because TV dramas are a good source for psychological education. :rolleyes:
Of course, but it seems that schizophrenia is a disorder in the brain, so drugs will probably be the only option.
Sure, right after they cure cancer and AIDS.
Thanks, Guin 
Let’s say that one day you were on the worst day of misery after a really bad breakup and went out drinking with your friends to cheer up; one of your friends was a bit sillier and inclined towards juvenile mischief than you usually are but in your mood of the time it felt liberating to act out and feel like you just don’t give a fuck anymore, ya know? So when your silly friend describes a time in high school when they put Fab detergent in the public fountain you decide the bunch of you is gonna do so tonight, and she goes in with you and y’all buy the soap and put it in the fountain, and then you jump in the fountain and talk about how they do these bubble parties somewhere that you’re read about, and hey your other friends start making like wet blankets and won’t join in and after awhile, leave; and you get a but sulky but stay splashing in the fountain in the soap suds when the cops show up. And at the police station your friend manages to make sense but you alternate between giddy/silly and crying about your boyfriend and you sass the cops some in your giddier moments.
Now pretend that was a decade and a half ago, you were in the mental bin for only two months and except for when you hang out with your friends and reminisce you don’t think about it much. You get written up in the Regional News for the contract work you’ve done on the Chamber of Commerce and the reporter asks you for a brief bio. You gonna put down that you are a former mental patient?
But if you go berserk and take a rifle to the elementary school and shoot holes in random faculty members after your proposal to the School Board gets voted down, will it make the papers that an untreated mental patient just mowed down a bunch of schoolteachers? If the record is in any fashion available to the press’s investigations, or that of the police looking into things, it will be.
That’s a big part of the reason y’all don’t have much experience with together-sounding schizophrenics. Those of us who manage to dig out and get the lines to meet at right angles again don’t generally advertise this aspect of our past. Furthermore, those of us who can “pass” tend to put a hell of a lot more energy into poise and distinctively recognizable self-control and calculated rational thinking and detachments from seeing and describing only the viewpoints we think are valid, at the expense of ways of thinking and being in this world which were harmless and also more “us”, at least until the nuthouse shit happened to us. Being locked up for being fervent and emphatic and wrapped up in your own strongly-felt but very unusual views will sure as hell teach you the tactical value of stepping outside yourself and planning how you’re going to come across. Especially if you’re going to wear a sign that says, in essence, “Hi, I’m a crazy fucker, an escaped paranoid schizophrenic”. For all I know, someone like laigle is going to decide it’s his civic duty to trace my real identity and call the cops cuz there’s a maniac on the loose at <my home address>". So I play it cold like I have to be an attorney arguing for AHunter3 instead of just being AHunter3.
Research…
There’s a fair amount of research but most of us in the movement feel like the effort and money goes to the big dogs that bark up what we think of as the same old wrong trees: pharmaceutical trials and other narrowly-conceptualized medical-model projects that still assume the constellation of feelings and perceptions and externally observable behaviors we call schizophrenia are a single disease, physiological and monocausal in nature.
What we think works, and therefore where we’d like to see the research and pilot-project money go, is into creating “safe homes” such as Zuzu’s Place in Boston and the Vancouver Emotional Emergency Center of old in Vancouver – places where you can check in and devote your attention to sorting out your head without worrying for the time being about stability or how you appear to others. Places where no one is trying to get you to take psych meds. Places where you aren’t assumed to lack competency and decision-making authority. In practice, that has always meant user-run self-help centers, and while we do get funding for “day centers” / “outreach centers” such as Boston’s Ruby Rogers Advocacy and Drop-in Center, the most significant unmet need for us is safe places to go when we think we’re going nuts, to be in an environment of other kindred spirits who know what it’s like and who know how to be supportive without being intrusive. (Other successful user-run projects include Howie the Harp’s “All-the-Way Housing” project for homeless folks with psych histories in California and a similar one somewhere in Florida that activist Sally Zinman was involved in). Upstate in New York, George Ebert is doing some cool stuff with the Mental Health Alliance group, and David Oaks has a coalition group in Oregon with some self-help initiatives.
The most meaningful research I’ve run across seems to indicate that all other things being equal, the factor most likely to result in a patient’s staying out of psych hospitals permanently and becoming self-supporting in the community is getting off psych meds and staying off them and having no further contact with the mental health system. Now, that’s a finding that should provoke a lot of initial skepticism, since if some third factor causes someone to get well to the point they don’t need psych meds, then both the absense of psych meds and the lowered rate of subsequent psych hospitalizations and/or system dependency would be explained by that third factor, rather than the absence of psych meds explaining the lower hospitalization and dependency rate. Still, for people who think of the meds as the answer, or as the best answer we’ve got, it should prompt at least a moment’s pause. Me, I think it means exactly what it purports to mean. When you stay on schizophrenia meds, your capacities are impaired and you are brought into regular ongoing contact with the mental health system, and you internalize more of a sense of yourself as a sick and limited person as well as having that identity thrust more upon you by others. If, on the other hand, you successfully wean off them, and steer clear of the psychiatric system, you’ll at least some of the time, in some cases, learn to deal with who you are and how you are different, and how you have to cope with the world as a consequence.
If those skills are picked up by us on our own individually at least some of the time, as seems to be the case, it seems to me that the smart money is on us helping each other as a community and serving as each other’s extended care and support system.
And that’s the therapy they should be researching.
Zagadka, I just expect less of people-contact and relationships.
I don’t know if I’ve got missing pieces and stuff or not, and I do get piercingly lonely at times – yes I will admit that it bothers me that I can be on this board since 1997 and somone will pop up out of nowhere and post prolific and soon they are popular and people care about them personally, and I will just not have that effect on them, or vice versa, and will always be experienced in a more mono-dimensional way, and it’s not just here on this board it is everywhere and always, I will never ever be part of any group, really, and will always have times of feeling like I only thought I was at the party and in real life was just standing outside in the garden in the dark looking in the window pretending – but other times I feel like everyone else is dancing the same few limited and worn-out set of thought-dances and experience-dances, sleepwalking through life just believing what everyone else around them believes, most of them long since having stopped trying to figure out anything if they ever did and instead just adopting and adapting and fitting in so they won’t have to worry about being wrong and being thought wrong, and then I feel like I’m the lucky one, the free one. And a lot of the time I am not lonely because I feel emotionally self-sufficient. As long as I have some human contact and companionship some of the time, it doesn’t greatly matter with whom I have it or if there is a great deal of continuity there.
How is it for you, the “other people thing”?
I hate the psych drugs. Brain-rape. Rather be dead. I totally support your right to take them if they help you, just as I totally support your right not to if you don’t want to.
Do you socialize with other schizzies in your area? Any in the rights movement? Curious, want any contacts?
Zagadka, you don’t have to be so hostile. My point was, I don’t know a lot about schizophrenia, and common perception seems to make it worse.
I wasn’t suggesting a cure-I was saying maybe they’ll find a drug that will be able to TREAT it as there are drugs to treat various anxiety disorders and depression.
Pharmacalogical treatment of anxiety and depression is little simpler than for schizophrenia.
Given what little I know about psychiatric drugs and drug developent in general, I think it’s reasonable to expect that the future will bring antipsychotics with fewer side effects. Drugs that would do a better job of treating the actual symptoms of schizophrenia are probably a long way off, though. The causes of schizophrenia still aren’t well understood, and there may be factors involved that wouldn’t respond to drug treatment at all.
I don’t know the current research on schizophrenia, but I do know that many people suffering from other mental illnesses or even serious cognitive disabilities have benefited greatly from behavioral therapy and other non-pharmaceutical treatments. As AHunter3 mentioned, it is sometimes possible for people with mental health issues to learn how to better function in society and interact “normally” with others. This is true even with people suffering from disorders associated with aggressive, unpredictable behavior that might pose a threat to others. Of course medication may also be helpful, but pills alone are often not enough.
The causes of most mental illnesses and disorders are little-understood. In many cases, such as with depressive illnesses (lumping it all under ‘depression’ is misleading in this context), there is a complex combination of genetic, behavioural, habitual and chemical causes. In some cases pharmaceuticals are enough my themselves; in other cases behavioural therapies work, in yet others psychotherapy. However, sometimes no solution can be found.
In some ways, schizophrenia should be simpler. There is more evidence that it is a result of specific abnormalities in brain function, perhaps more comparable to something like epilepsy. At the moment, drugs only treat the symptoms. And with a definite physiological cause, behavioural and psychological therapies are unlikely to be able to do much good by themselves.
I’m not sure this is the case. It may be so with schizophrenia, I don’t know, but it’s not true of all disorders with a physiological cause. For instance, Fragile X Syndrome is caused by an abnormality on the X chromosome (hence the name) that leads to low levels of a particular protein needed by nerve cells in the brain. Someday there might be a form of gene therapy that could truly cure this condition, but although their condition has a physiological cause people with FXS can and do benefit from behavioral therapy – in some cases dramatically. Similarly, the only established treatments for autism are non-pharmaceutical.
Medication may be used to treat problems associated with both FXS and autism, but there’s not anything available that really helps with the core disorders. If medications could be found that would help then combination therapy would probably be more effective than non-pharmaceutical treatment alone, but in the meantime well-implemented behavioral therapy can do a lot of people a lot of good. The brain is a truly amazing organ with great potential to adapt and grow. Behavioral therapy can actually encourage it to change in beneficial ways. This is especially true in children, but it can work with adults too. Some people don’t show much improvement even with therapy, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t potentially be helped by new and improved methods.