I cringed when I wrote the phrase "psychiatric holocaust" for the reasons you mentioned here. I have a master's degree in counseling from a long time ago, 1986. I was taught to love Carl Rogers, that ECT was barbaric, and such.

The world is so changed. A psychology professor friend of mine explained last year her theory of the problem which I will now paraphrase. According to her, the DSM was initially written at time when it was believed that the entire human race was evolving into something more civilized and that every single human had at least one problem, probably more, that could be helped with psychiatric treatment of some sort, so the DSM was just a list of everything that any of the contributors had ever noticed wrong with anyone. It wasn't intended to be used as a way to label some people sick and some well but to help everyone identify what might at certain times be going on with them. The DSM creators were not suggesting that each and every DSM number was a biochemical illness with a specific chemical cause in the brain that could be fixed with a pill and it was not intended as a legal document, a sort of criminal code in which everyone who met a listing should suffer curtailment of liberty and other consequences. Instead it was a sort of manual of self improvement for the human race.

I'm not sure how accurate this is. I don't have any preface to any addition of the DSM in front of me, but it helps me understand that there are still good people in the mental health field that can help which is good because it seems like reform will need to come from the inside.

Phil,

Frankly, I'm way past the point where I care what people think of me and what I think/say/do, etc. ALL, but ALL, behaviour is learnt. Of that I am quite convinced. How it was learnt is a matter for the individual to explain.

If you find this difficult to believe, then I suggest that you take a NLP course, sometime soon. The idea that a person must spend 20 years talking to a shrink and taking drugs in order to be considered "well," once diagnosed, is utterly preposterous. 20 minutes, possibly.

And when you realize the simple reason that most people behave in a "disempowering" way more often than not boils down to the simple fact that nobody ever showed them something more efficient, you'll find it difficult to understand how it ever was that anybody could think differently.

Matt

The discrediting of critics as Scientologists is a deliberate strategy, check the youtube videos by ex-pharma reps for the scoop. When speaking before policy-makers the lobbyist for my state "federation of psychiatry" invokes Scientology preemptively in his testimony, forestalling and poisoning the discourse before it begins. Our opponents have their framing down pat, and we don't even think in terms of framing, much less staying within our own frame without conceding an inch, as they do. We need to start, now. This is politics.

I'm learning I can't take anything for granted, and just have to keep saying I am not a goddamn zealot, I am against coercion and bad medicine, and for civil rights, choice, and self-directed treatment.

Just read this piece from AMNews saying psychiatrists are beginning to grapple with these issues. Suggesting they abandon the term "compliant" and "non-compliant" and begin working with the reality of what we do with our meds, and speaking in terms of "concordance". Seems like a step in the right direction.

"We've learned from our [patients] they do best when we let them take charge of themselves," Dr. Elpers says. "Medications are helpful but only helpful when the client understands how to take them. We need to teach patients how to manage symptoms, give them the freedom to adjust them. In this way the physician becomes a consultant for the patient."

And many physicians are moving beyond "compliance" to "concordance" or "aiming for agreement," Dr. Sachs says. "We are mapping out together, asking patients, 'How do we get here?' The key is to formulate a menu of choices for the patient and then negotiate."

http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/10/15/hlsa1015.htm

In a psychology class this week I made the statement that only three diagnoses really remain for adults - MDD, Bipolar, Schizophrenia, we've lost our sense of nuance. Needless to say, it was not well received, mostly denied. Mental health professions will be unable/unwilling to understand and act upon these problems until an ecological perspective is reintroduced to the field. Under the medical model ailments are incredibly too individualistic, within this paradigm we are unable to understand the broader issues at hand that need not be reduced to a label.

Wow Philip. I find myself as fantastically tongue tied on this subject as well. Thanks for trying to articulate it.

Phillip, I just re-read this with more attention to your quandary, and I say unvarnished scorn is the way to go when some ignorant fuck slams you as anti-psychiatry.

It comes as no surprise to ME that I find myself in agreement with psychiatrists on a daily basis, which means I have no patience for asshats who owe their antipsychiatry epithets to having read a Wikipedia page. A worthy adversary proves their worth, because on the rare occasions I cross one, s/he makes me re-examine my own ideology.

I have come across a number of shiboleths in the "antipsychiatry" movement. One is that there is no genetic component for bipolar disorder. It blows me away to have had to argue about something like this when my grandmother died in the twenties of bp, my father was killed in the early forties in the early days of electroshock,my son with bp was killed by Zyprexa, my great aunt committed suicide as a bp,my first cousin has bp, many cousins and relatives have depression, anxiety, and on and on. The same has happened with electroshock. I can understand why people want to get rid of it but when asking them what was I to do instead in a crisis situation and few resources around (there are seldom many resources around) the answer is silence. Who are these people to make pronouncements on my life, and on the tragedies my family has suffered over multiple generations. I am not taking sides - I am just telling the reality as my family has lived it and died it.I totally don't understand the poster who said that all of this is learned behavior, and these are debates that I am too worn out to join.

Well re: learned behavior: a little over a year ago my daughter was discharged with "impulse control disorder" and on Clozaril. This time they gave her the schizophrenia label, Clozaril and the state institution. I think we can all be proactive in our care of self at a certain point, which could fall into the "behavior" category; but when my daughter truly believes atomic bombs are lining the halls, and terrified of them--she isn't doing a behavior. She's lost in a world no one can bring her out of[right now]. But she got the label. After 8 years. There you go. Sealed the deal for the mental health system is what that label did.[to keep her locked up].

GT, everyone in my family suffered severe and persistent MI, and were institutionalized, had electroshock, lobotomy, dual diagnosis and suicides. Mental illness runs in families, and is handed down through generations, it acts like a subculture, people grow up in craziness, it's all they know and that's what they become.

Your story is very common, as is your argument from declaration, but there is still no genetic proof, meanwhile there are many people like me, who grew up in madness, and visited relatives regularly in mental hospitals who broke the family mold, I do not live the way I was brought up, and have worked very hard to regain my faculties. This is also very common, but we don't hear the stories as much as we hear the "lifelong debilitating disease model." I still deal with serious psychological scars resulting from my traumatic up-bringing, and always will, but I'm a sane and functional person who is nothing like the way I was growing up and in my first decade in adulthood, before entering long-term intensive psychotherapy. When I unlearned my learned behavior, and learned new things. You say you do not like or understand learned behavior, ok, but that's what it means to be human.

I resent this paradigm that tells me I'm a hopeless label, that denies my lived experience and my heroic efforts to overcome my lived experience. And for nothing but the sake of a theory, and a very convenient theory it is, which blames the victim, keeps her from identifying social ills, keeps her passive and conforming and self-destructively repeating family patterns, and tragically unable to move on with her life.

Ugh, sorry that comment is so run on and sloppy, I'm tired too.

"Anti-psychiatrist" is a label that I've encountered as well. The irony is, I have a blog that is jam-packed with articles written by psychiatrists and psychologists. Apparently, they're all anti-psychiatrists too, even the psychiatrists! I've since come to understand that an "anti-psychiatrist" is someone who doesn't support the prevailing biomedical theory as being the only valid model for schizophrenia.



What should be borne in mind is that the biomedical model is a theory only, and there are other people with other theories who are producing results that are far superior to those who operate from the biomedical paradigm. Two doctors who I sincerely admire are John Weir Perry and Jaakko Seikkula. Both of them produced recovery rates in the range of 85%. For schizophrenia!



With rates like that you'd think that caregivers would be running over top of each other to find out what these men were doing that was able to produce so much success but truth is, no one's all that interested. In this culture, we have pills and chronicity for those suffering with schizophrenia. Anyone who suggests that this should not be and that other valid options and belief paradigms exist ... well, that's the stuff that "anti-psychiatry" is made of.

As a caregiver/mom I was shocked the mainstream psych paradigm is flourishing. I actually think I went into shock. It has taken me 4 days to realize what happened.Without any offer of hope.

My name is Ronald Dishinger My web is www.biochemimbal-behavior.com I am not some quack so please do not dismaiss this email to you. Epigentics:The new kid on the block is egigentics which is the turning "on or off "of certain genes in the human being for good health. Egigentics envolves what we eat, breathe,our behavior, and even think to alter a gene to turn "on or off" for good health.All gene are expressed by a complicated process of many thousands of enzymes or catalysts(chemical reactions) that allow a gene to be expressed or not expressed for good health. A enzyme can be made up of many thousands of atoms in the the many molecules and because of our biochemical individuality we all have different requirements for these enzymes to take place to alter a gene. You may need this or that and I need this or that. However with biochemical individuality we all have similar functions but not the same. For example to get rid of a flu virus one person many need 20,000 mg of vitamin C to kill the virus and another person may need 50,000mg for that same virus. Yes it may be the number of virus cells that have duplicated and where it has travveld in the body but even if we could calculate the number of cells of each person for those virus cells each person would respond differently to the vitamin C for recovery.

This synergenism is what we are all about as humans. We are indeed similar but so different.Genes also have time line and evolutionary dependence. First the time line: we may not have a disease for many yeasr and then all of sudden have this disease. We may have have had this disease since birth or even as a fetus. We may also have the disease as something from many generations ago that our ancestors did. Time line illness means that a gene may be in the off position when in good health and then at a certain non- determened time a illness appears such as schizophrenias at age 18 years. It is rather rare to have childhood schizophrenia even though it does happen- the same with cancer. Why does it happenen in the first place. The total synergy of the entire organsim has changes with even enzymes doing their proper job but the gene switch has been altered. Many times we may think it is the gene switch in the wrong positon of "on or off" when in fact it is a ezymematic fault. Then we come to evolutionary genes postions. Then it really gets complicated especially because of our biochemical individuality. If we used a numerical number for what we we have to do to have good health in terms of evolutionary genes than there is no possible way to designate this huge number. The genes in every cell in our bodies has been altered by some eyzematic reaction somewhere in our past evlolution and therefore there is no way to say what each of some 5000 ezymes that "fire-off" every second in our bodies will be from this or that time frame and what we do about it.

Western medicine and thought is directled at single things rather than complete things. This is a huge mistake in the ways we look at humans either medically, socially or spiritually. For example we know that large doses of vitamin C will kill virues but we don not know even to this day how and why all the enzematic reactions happen. Yes take the vitamin C to kill viruses but remember there are too many other things that happen too. In Tibetan medicine since the year 715 they have had all of the now called epigenetic philosophy- good behaviors, good and proper foods, herbs(which we may call our vitamins or nutrients) and thought or religious actions which have a control over all the other aaspects. Tibetan medicine is looking at the total of how all things together fit together. Fo example there is not one single formula that has less than 22 igredients from different plants or even minerals or even animals in that formula. This is synergistic. How did they come to this knowledge. Guess what, Buddha 2550 years ago told of these formulas and exactly what to do.Sound strnage? Yes it is when one is looking for single concepts even as vitmain C or a single gene or even a single ezyme. We are now in the last 500 years of Buddha’s prophosies in terms of helath and illiness. No I do not know why we are in this time frame but do know that the things Buddha said are now coming to pass such as the high rate of cancer for example. There is 0% breast cancer in Tibet. Why? Is it diet, attitude,genes, lifestyle or what is it? Yet Buddha told of which formulas that had never before been used for treating this new disease called cancer. Instant remission of disease always seems to impress people in the western world but it is not viewed as anything special in Tibetan medicine. Please read in Dr. Yeshi Dhoden’s book "Healing from the Source" ISBN #1-55939-148-0 published by Snow Lion Publications in 2000 starting at page 126 on . You will indeed find causes and behaviors to prevent cancers. Please stop looking at individual entities of the human. Your thimble full of knowledge causes many others to suffer and have great pain. It is mean-spirited for me to say this but I am trying to get people to understand that in fact many in the Western World are in fact causing great pain and suffering by their own individual ignorance. It is not about methylation or even genes but about far more than that type of science will ever understand. If I can help in your awareness please call me. I too am just a different level of awareness- not better or worse han yours- just differeent. Ronald Dishinger 5/25/09