June 04, 2008Harvard To Teens Who Smoke And Drink: You Are All Bipolar NowSo the Joe Biederman group at Harvard and Mass. General is at it again. Biederman is, of course, famous as the Harvard psychiatrist who is the chief propagator of the bipolar child child paradigm. In a study of adolescents with and without bipolar disorder--average age 13.5 years old--researchers found an increased risk that the bipolar teens abused substances and smoked cigarettes, independent of comorbidity for ADHD, anxiety, and conduct disorder. From this researchers conclude: "Adolescent bipolar disorder is a significant risk factor for substance use disorders and cigarette smoking, independent of psychiatric comorbidity. Clinicians should carefully screen adolescents with bipolar disorder for substance and cigarette use." Or more aggressively in a press release: "[Wilens, study lead author] adds that clarifying whether bipolar disorder begins before substance abuse starts could have 'a huge impact. If BPD usually precedes substance abuse, there may be intervention points where we could reduce its influence on drug and alcohol abuse. Aggressive treatment of BPD could cut the risk of substance abuse, just as we have shown it does in ADHD.' Wilens is an associate professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School." (Emphasis mine.) I've long been waiting for doctors to declare smokers and drinkers to be "disordered" or insane, so it's especially nice that the Biederman group (Joe is the paper's second listed author) chose to focus on young teenagers. They'll get around to adults later. Or someone else at Harvard will. So, look out bad kids lurking 'round the corner at school: Harvard wants to diagnose and medicate you. The paper does ignore several possibilities for what's afoot here. If these kids have bipolar disorder, chances are fairly good that they are on some kind of medication for it (especially if they are anywhere near the Biederman group). Perhaps, the meds are making them feel so dead in the head that they are medicating themselves to feel alive. It would be interesting if the paper had teased out the behaviors between medicated and unmedicated groups of teens. Also ignored is any evidence of environmental problems at home such as childhood traumas (parents smacking kids, etc.) which do seem to be prevalent amongst youth with mood disorders. Unmentioned as well is that alcohol and tobacco use by 13-year-olds is generally illegal, so you have to wonder exactly how much these kids are drinking and smoking since their access to such things at the local market isn't going to be very good. Also overlooked are assertions in the clinical literature that bipolar disorder is being misdiagnosed at up to a 50 percent rate. But then you'd not expect that kind of introspection from Biederman. I'm not particularly impressed with Wilens' assertion that ADHD meds cut substance abuse. In two papers last month, Biederman and other researchers wrote of substance abuse prevalence among people diagnosed with ADHD s kids and treated with stimulants and concluded that there was no association between the two. But an editorial in the same issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry identified that 10 year followups among these ADHD kids in the two studies produced: "[H]igh rates (up to 45 percent) of substance use disorders in their adult cohorts, but both conclude that the long-established clinical practice of the use of stimulant medication to treat young children with ADHD does not affect—neither increasing nor decreasing—the risk for substance abuse in adulthood." Forty-five percent is kind of a high prevalence, on or off stimulants, depending on how one defines substance abuse. Or would the prevalence be 75 percent without the magic of Adderall? Posted by Philip Dawdy at June 4, 2008 12:01 AM
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Oh, Western Civilization and drugs, taking paych drugs IS abuse by substance, or substance abuse depending on whether you're forced to take them by a pshrink or sold them on the playground by a kid who's forced to take them but not being drug tested yet. As I've said over and over again, since the sixties, teen psych prisons, mills (or if you're deluded enough, healing, therapeutic hospitals) equate smoking marijuana only once or suspicion of smoking marijuana as proof of a life long mental illness. In the sixties it was schizophrenia, in the eighties it changed to bipolar disorder. If you're a girl and god forbid you get caught having sex, well, bipolar and maybe borderline too depending on the region where you live. If you're a lower class teen, pot will land you in jail with a diagnosis of anti social personality disorder and maybe bipolar if you're white, more likely schizophrenia if you're another race, though more and more bipolar is becoming a trendy diagnosis for all races. The diagnosis of addictive personality disorder (also bullsh*t as it's only given to those who get caught) is always accompanied by some other bs diagnosis be it adhd, bipolar or schizophrenic. Posted by: Sally at June 4, 2008 03:07 AMGrace Jackson, author of Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs, and others that espouse the more controversial view that psych drugs have neurotoxic effects, claim that the view medications have "protective effects" with regard to substance abuse is complete baloney and that it's in fact exactly the opposite. Children exposed to stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin go on to have higher rates of cocaine and illegal drug abuse as adults than children who aren't. I'm guessing any evidence of a "protective effect" is highly manipulated. It makes a lot more sense that Ritalin and all the others are a segue into substance abuse, not the opposite. Posted by: Sara at June 4, 2008 05:24 AMJoe Biederman is sitting in his corner of the world as a KOL (key opinion leader) not giving public interviews, yet widely influencing doctors, psychiatrists, etc. This just makes me want to rip my hair out! Do you know I found a study where he backed up the work ADHD in kids via an old book titled "Fidgety Philip"?! So he helps people some will say. Big deal! The drugging of the American mind has been influenced by his work to the point that just about every single age group (including little kids)has a reason to be medicated, as well as for just about every thought up personality characteristic, and now THIS. I don't care who comes along to defend Biederman here. There is such a thing as highly influential people and that can become a dangerous thing, especially taking a look at the industry we are talking about. I wonder what Charles Nemeroff thinks of this, as a cigar smoker! Posted by: Stephany at June 4, 2008 09:40 AMYour commentary has the reported relationship between bipolar disorder and substance abuse backwards. If early-onset bipolar disorder is a risk factor for substance abuse, it does not necessarily follow that people who abuse substances are likely to be bipolar. This is the conditional probability fallacy--that the probability of someone having bipolar disorder given that he/she uses substances is equal to the probability that he/she uses substances given that he/she has bipolar disorder. i'm with gerbil on this... "i see what i eat" is not at all the same as "i eat what i see" as lewis carroll so aptly put it. Posted by: anon mom at June 4, 2008 11:51 AMDearest Philip: I would expect nothing less from those Harvard know it all types; that have probably never stepped outside their luxurious academic offices, and experienced any sense of the real world going on around them. Don't you just love the intellectual audacity in takes to diagnose the masses from a box of indoctrinated posturing of the “we know better set” ; dismissive of everyone else’s rational, evidenced, formulated, documented, common sense, experienced, and substantiality concluded applicable actuality. These so called educated puppets are using ludicrous rationalization as the detached pundits of hypocrisy they truly are. I find them both amusing on some fanatical unhinged level, and quite bothersome and disturbing in their pronounced stage antics of ignorance on another. You just have to wonder where all those gigantic grants they live on come from. Don’t ponder to long! Do we have any guesses? SHHHH! We all need quiet here to thunk! Bi_ _Har_a Yours truly Why is it, that psychiatry has free reign to every decade become completely beyond the pale and scandalous. Perturbing a child, a teen, and adult's ORGANIC neurology for life, with polypharmacy guesswork, as an obscenity, a crime against nature. What kind of world, straining here, WHAT kind of world, society, man, woman, family, nation, ACCEPTS a cross to bear of a terrible disease and terrible toxic slush hindering their every move for decades, based on such diagnostic 'technology' as a CHECKLIST? When will people demand evidence of organic defect before augmenting and flushing the organic neurology for life with guesswork? THe writing is on the wall. THE DISEASE isn't diagnosed with technology. The medication isn't adjusted with technology. There is a stinking cadaver in the room called this is a guesswork pseudoscience evading owning up to being an emperor with no clothes!!! How COULD you believe them! Anything they say! Have they seen in your brain? NO. Are you giving them complete open access to your brain, thought processes, and every vital organ in your body with guesswork drugs never tested on animals that had a known disease? YES. Sure 'doctor' whatever you say, it sound pretty scary what 'I HAVE'. My terrible genetic brain disease. I'm Michael J Fox by any other name. I'm just like that. And I will obey and 'fix' my brain each day with these chemicals in pill form that you doctor told me act on my disease. Harvard guy, true believer, consummate evil, these ivy league boiler rooms, who gave us the neocons, napalm, the bomb, they are out of control. This guy needs to be stopped. I started smoking at 14. I was in a house of 4 smoker adults. Does that mean they, oh of course it does, that's where I got my genetic brain disease. Yeah my genetic brain disease that a bunch of zealots tried to convince me I had. Unfortunately they had a checklist as the sole evidence of defect, and I'm no longer a customer. When a checklist is considered diagnostic technology, it reminds me of another faith based 'new science of mental health' which has something called 'LRH tech'. Psychiatry and scientology seem to have alot of 'tech' that has been handed down from long dead ideologues. They have much in common. They both steal money and years of peoples lives. Only psychiatry has oh about a million times more graves to answer for than the small fries killer scientology. 'LRH tech'! 'DSM IV'. I like it. Til next time. Don't become a statistic, don't become diagnosed, and manually manipulate some shrink in the nose with your fist for me if you see one. THanks. Posted by: Poe at June 4, 2008 09:27 PMHi gerbil, I've a question about your posting on conditional probabilities. Just trying to keep the facts straight in my head. I understand the probability of someone having bipolar disorder given they abuse is not the same as the probability they abuse given they have bipolar disorder. The actual numbers are related by Bayes theorem. However, the variables of substance abuse and bipolar disorder may still be highly correlated, and if they are, it seems reasonable to take this into consideration in making a diagnosis. I would and seems like it would be common sense. I was wondering if the Biederman people, or who ever else, actually looked at the correlation numbers, or did they actually jump straight from conditionals to making inferences? This only involves a 2 x 2 joint probability table to describe things. Playing around a bit you can see that for any fixed pair of conditional probabilities you set, the correlation coefficient is still a free variable. It can be anywhere from 0 to 1 in absolute value for the same conditionals (or marginals). Thanks. Posted by: cairn at June 5, 2008 09:50 AMJust look at the above comment. Statistics this, statisitcs that. You can get all the useless math you want and wheel it out. I can take a group of a hundred 'Bipolar' people and roll the outcomes up and out each and every but loose with math but in the end what put them in that category of 'Bipolar' in the first place? A flimsy guesswork checklist. No objective diagnostic technology goes into in the first place. So dressing up a subjective load of crap with a heap of after analysis is not science. You sound like a true believer. You sound insane. LRH Tech, APA Tech. One and the same. Posted by: Poe at June 5, 2008 08:02 PM"Bipolarity"!!!! I believe it's necessary to start shouting. but I'm sure they'll give me an Haldol Posted by: Ana at June 6, 2008 04:37 AMPoe wrote: Just look at the above comment. Statistics this, statisitcs[sic] that. You can get all the useless math you want and wheel it out. Poe, Understanding statistics is important to be able to tell when someone is just wanking and counting on other people's ignorance to make claims that are not backed up by the facts. You can pride yourself on your own ignorance if you want, but it's better to be able to argue against claims made by researchers in the published literature on their terms if you believe they're wrong. It also lets you give credit where credit is due. Gerbil made a very good point. And extending her thinking, if the Biederman people didn't calculate the correlation and simply exchanged dependencies to argue their claim, then their claim truly is bogus. I'm on your side, dude. But I want the numbers to back me. Posted by: cairn at June 6, 2008 06:58 AMcairn, How are Bipolarity statistics done? Shame on you Poe! How can you talk seriously about mental disorders without knowing statistics? All schizophrenics on mental health institutions in Brazil smoke. I never thought about that before, Ana. Why do the DSM and ICD have "statistical" in their title? I've never seen anything statistical in excerpts, or in discussions or the literature. Posted by: cairn at June 6, 2008 11:56 AMcairn,
You're all barking up the wrong tree. I can put people into the category of asshole, asshole type 1, asshole not otherwise specified... and work statistics around the outcomes in their lives after I launch an uncalled for attack on their neurology with random guesswork pharmacology.... The point is. It doesn't matter what is done in the after analysis you can build two hundred thousand studies around the outcome of these 'diagnosed' assholes, doesn't change the fact they were arbitrarily labeled an asshole, and the people labeling them assholes did it based on nothing but guesswork and speculation. The only thing I would say about people labeled with contrived 'disease' psychiatry has chosen to name 'schizophrenia' who smoke, is that firstly, having all hope and trust in your own mind and future shattered by psychiatry's power and profit driven devoid of reality 'disease model'... who wouldn't want to pick up a smoke. Also I would say, tobacco is psychoactive in itself, and how many enlarged ventricle studies passed off as evidence of a biomarker, are in fact tobacco damage? We will never know I guess. And I would also say, that a brain in a constant starving state for a fix of nicotine over its lifespan, also under fire from guesswork chemical attacks from daily chemical lobotomies, is a brain that is going to show structural changes, and even be more susceptible to psychosis. I take your points about fighting them on their own ground in the math department, but I fail to see how spending time analyzing outcomes of people in categories can get anywhere real, when they are placed in that category with pathetic guesswork and wild assumptions... Some one in Brazil said the following to me in a comment above..... "How can you talk seriously about mental disorders without knowing statistics?" No my friend, how can anyone talk seriously about mental disorders when they cannot even be reliably diagnosed, and when all they are is a useless label used for medicalizing human distress. There is no observable disease, there is no uniform start middle or end, everybody's experience of the alleged 'disease' differs immensely. And when applying these labels are invariably destructive, to social identity, self esteem, outcomes, and when they are all treated with the same polypharmacy guesswork pharmacology in the end and only exist for insurance companies to pay out pseudocientific assholes to dole out guesswork harmful fraudulent 'medicine' in the name of reductionism and biological determinism gone mad by an army of hundreds of thousands of rote trained assholes with psych textbooks and dogma in their god damn heads with indoctrinated bullshit ideas on human distress running around the globe like a bull in a china shop fucking up millions of lives. Brazil goes on further to add... "All schizophrenics on mental health institutions in Brazil smoke." Wrong. A majority of distressed people who have been labeled with the assumed brain disease 'schizophrenia' based on nothing but their behavior, may smoke. In fact, the only biological similarity between these people is they all smoke. To put them all in one category is ludicrous, if you say all the diabetics in a hospital smoke, yes, I will agree, because they are all holding objective test results showing they have a disease, and they are all smoking.
It's not a disease. It's a group of people who have one psychosis of unknown origin, probably had psychosocial stressors IGNORED by the shrinks, probably used drugs, probably been kept in a perpetual state of guesswork pharmacological attack since the first psychosis, and are probably fucked as a result, combined with the identity destruction wreaked on their human hopes for the future taken away when a shrink told them they have no hope, no future, and have a 'genetic brain disease' which he diagnosed with no biotechnology diagnostics, just a fucking pathetic checklist. I would be DEAD right now if I had have gotten the shizophrenia label. Fortunately I only had my youth stolen and most of my life destroyed by an every so slightly less 'hopeless' label. This is the kicker.... It is a fucking roulette wheel what diagnosis you get from the indoctrinated pseudoscientists, I came within a hair of that label, and all this is decided by what whim these guesswork speculation crippled assholes are following that day. Given there is no objective idea of what is happening in any brain owned by the people who are called 'patients', I still find it obscene that anyone could hand over their neurology for these amateurs to play around with. Guesswork pharmacology is BLOODLETTING FOR THE ELECTRON MICROSCOPE AGE. Shiny words, shiny imaging. NO UNDERSTANDING. NONE AT ALL. ORGANIC NEUROLOGY UNTIL PROVEN DEFECTIVE. GET YOUR IDEOLOGY OFF MY NEUROLOGY. Ten trillion times for dangerous than a psychotic killer? = You trusting psychiatry. Posted by: Poe at June 7, 2008 03:36 AMPoe,
Mindfreedom in doing a lot of effort to change "schizophrenia" into another name. GET YOUR IDEOLOGY OFF MY NEUROLOGY If you were talking to a psychiatrist I'm sure he would be noting on one of those notebooks: This is considered as a symptom. You can think that I'm on psychiatrists side! "GET YOUR IDEOLOGY OFF MY NEUROLOGY." Poe, that's exquisite. I want it on a tee shirt. You just made my day. Cheers. Posted by: Francesca Allan at June 7, 2008 08:47 PMStatistics is a tool to understand factors that affect the health of people. It's a methodical approach based on real evidence that can suggest effective procedures for diagnosis and treatment. John Snow's examination of the Broad Street pump in London's cholera outbreak of 1854 was just the beginning a new systematic method to looking at illness. If it's a choice between ignorance and knowledge, I choose knowledge. Posted by: cairn at June 7, 2008 10:46 PMBrief reactive psychosis. This exists. Schizophrenics in longer term psychosis are INVARIABLY people who have had guesswork pharmacology thrown indiscriminately at their neurology from day 1 of hospitalization to often years even decades later. Given that the burden of proof should be on accuser, and you accuse people of having an organic defect that needs to adulterated with chemicals, I suggest you prove defect. You cannot show me an example of a so labeled 'schizophrenic' whose original psychosis which was more than likely going to be short lived, which hasn't been prolonged, worsened, mangled, perpetuated by the chemical assault from psychiatry, and the reassuring words of doomsday lifelong disease put into his or her head. The fact remains, all interventions serve to worsen or at the very best perturb and mask. And the ultimate argument shutdown... all interventions, without exception, are guesswork and speculation. The record of long term effects and harm is abysmal, and the medium term effects of current 'treatments' are already littered with horror evidence of harm. If you say someone needs to be 'hospitalized' because they are a threat to self or others you really mean 'imprisoned' as there is nothing medical at all going on in a mental hospital. Nothing medical at all. No understanding of disease, no technology diagnosing provable organic defects, and nothing but guesswork pharmacology, ideology, dogma, and stab in the dark darts at a board electricity currents. If it were still fashionable, leucotomies would still be occurring in the US, and they are in China to the tune of dozens a year by the way in 2008. The bottom line is this... when a rapist or murderer is a threat to others they are put in leg irons and locked in a room. In a so called hospital, bodily integrity will be breached with chemical tranquilization, followed by indoctrination and dependency training leading to lifelong often institutionalization. When a person's life or other's life is in danger because the psychotic's limbs are going to pick up a weapon and harm themselves or others, disable the fucking limbs. Isolate them, immobilize them the same way rapists and murderers are. It is step FAR FAR FAR BEYOND to turn loose a dogmatic shrink on this person's brain! The shrink has a 'theory' as to what is going on. OK society says! by all means pierce this person's skin and inject him with whatever you like! as long as you have the agreement of thousands of other followers of your 'theory' that person's human rights don't matter. We don't care if they have a heart attack (Droperidol) or get TD, after all they are hopelessly diseased and defective. First day sick in their lives, but go right ahead, this disease has just been waiting for a relative to die, so it could rear its ugly head and have its 'onset'. Wrong. There is no justification for smashing people's neurology with neuroleptics when they haven't made an informed choice to seek such things out. Against someone's will, it is a crime against nature. A human experiment. There is no comparison to road trauma tourniquets being placed on my body when I am unconscious after a car accident. That is a demonstrable, observable, proven medical treatment that is in the interests of massively provable intervention that will prolong and save life. NOTHING beyond isolation, immobilization, incarceration, restraint, in emergency psychiatry, saves lives. And this is merely a police activity in the hands of psychiatry for one reason only, because society assumes them to have some insight into mental illness. Which they do not. And far from being neutral know nothings, they are infected with harmful speculative faith based ideologies of phantom 'lifelong brain diseases' which exist only in their collective opinions. and I will exercise my liberty to tell the world what madness is and isn't... given I am in a position to in fact do this, and do it thoughtfully, articulately and effectively. And to speak from rare experience as someone who has come back from journeys to the end of reason and beyond, and from psychiatric abuse years long and beyond, and lived to tell the tale with enough cognitive function left intact to remain an effective communicator. So basically, nothing can stop me. I can understand the pain that a spouse would go through when the loved one loses touch with reality for a while. For sure. I also understand whatever 'help' you think you all got, that conception you have that it was 'help' is nothing but a speculative impression that you've been left with after being sold spin. A jail cell in a prison is much safer than seclusion in a psych unit. There in the jail cell, society has protected the rights of others. And your right to your organic neurology is secured. Though biopsych is farming prisoners lately in its human experiments also. Watch the PBS frontline special online about juveniles in prison and watch the poor young guy give up and just say 'thorazine me out, I don't want to know, I'm done with this life'. Watch the immigrants being sedated also. Invariably, all individuals who have suffered psychosis who identify as advocates of neuroleptics possess absolutely no evidence of how and to what degree the period of overwhelm would have resolved and passed in a safe med-free soteria like environment. This is fact. And when you look at the overseas examples which juxtapose the violent chemical assaults for first ep psychosis in the west with individuals lucky enough to live in countries which are not pharmacracies as Szasz calls them, examples included in the two studies from the WHO which star in Whitaker's Mad in America, it becomes clear that any individual who has experienced psychotic overwhelm who advocates neuroleptics has no idea what the outcome would have been without them, but only a speculative crutch to stand on that things just simply of course would have gotten worse, but this is a myth. In the end the burden of proof is on them to prove they are guilty of suffering from organic defect. Until then, all anecdotal and all statistical appraisals of the effects on outcomes involving chemical compounds are nothing but placebo power of suggestion loads of shit. There is no justification for forced invasion of anyone's biology with guesswork pharmacology. The mere fact that it is guesswork should ring alarm bells to wider society in the utmost, that it doesn't is an obscenity to me. The fact those who have experienced the damage of this 'treatment' cannot have the right to a legally binding advance directive is a patent obscenity that condemns this nation. And this cairn guy, with his rote repetition of 'ignorance and knowledge'. Let me tell you pal, you've chosen to label me ignorant in a previous post, and I can tell you, that labels to me are like water off a duck's back. Your understanding of the word label came from a dictionary. So called 'knowledge' you have? Comparing cholera to contrived psychiatric labels masquerading as diseases? You can group and categorize all you like, human distress is not something to be studied at a distance with hundreds of thousands of white coat ideologues who are nothing but 'rote learners' who are harming the world. Rote learners should stick to building bridges and computer programming. Sending a pack of rote learners out loose on human distress was always going to end in disaster. It's a little INTANGIBLE quality called human understanding, love, empathy, hope, dignity that can't be seen with an electron microscope ok. Stop ruining the 21st century by prodding human distress with guesswork chemistry. Psychiatry is a like a spoiled little kid playing with a chemistry set. Sprays a heap of flies then studies the outcomes. Some slow down, some go in circles then die. Oh and Ana, to a human being undergoing psychotic overwhelm, who is placed in a cage and has his neurology altered with harmful guesswork, every other human being IS a menace. A betrayer, a hindering rather than helping menace, and pack of self deceiving criminals. Rabid criminals. Show me a lifelong psychotic who has been unadulterated by psychiatric guesswork pharmacology. Show me one. They do not exist. They don't exist because if he had been left alone and not subjected to psychiatric ideology, he wouldn't have a lifelong disability. Periods of overwhelm occur in the human experience. Depending on your experiences the overwhelming qualities of the period of overwhelm will be of varying intensity and length. When a phenomena is NOT UNDERSTOOD ON A BIOLOGICAL LEVEL AT ALL and when it can be demonstrated that outcomes are better without intervention how dare we throw our puny guesswork theories at it? And furthermore on a guttural human level how dare we rape other people's human rights in the process of attempting to understand it. Girlfriend leaves you. You get sorrowful. You drink for 9 days straight. You wake up hungover, perturbed out of balance biology from the up down depressive liquor, you remember the sorrow and continue to feel it. Modern civilization becomes overwhelming. Maybe someone dies, maybe you abuse some drugs. Odds on you are soaked in nicotine for good measure. You get psychotic. Your primary delusions fade within days. You can safely cross a road again. You are placed on neuroleptic polypharmacy for nine years. You go off meds, perturbed out of balance biology (due to meds), you remember the overwhelm and it begins again. Or, most likely it doesn't begin again, and you wasted nine years. Now, what if that nine years was spent growing as a human being, growing older, wiser, taking different mature views, developing as a person, and most importantly if you, when you were in the state of coming out of the initial overwhelm, were set on a journey of nine years of life, free from guesswork chemical lobotomy assault daily, and free from doom saying disease labels and stigma... One of these outcomes EXPONENTIALLY grows the feeling overwhelm at modern civilization, spreads fear and terror and a complete bereft of hope mentality into the psyche and the identity, and the other gives you a fighting chance. The only stats worth knowing in mental health are the following: Outcomes long term without neuroleptics better in a majority of people.
100% of psychoses have a drug induced or psychosocially induced cause. 0% of psychoses treated by psychiatrists can be demonstrated to have an organic etiology. Certain tumors and shit treated by neurologists aside. 100% of psychoses are treated by dogmatic biological determinist hubristic assholes who see you as a malfunctioning ape whose psychosocial history is nothing but the catalyst for a latent 'disease' that was always inside your brain to suddenly begin attacking your neurology. 100% of psychiatrists see you as a sad unfortunate diseased owner of defective genes. They have no biomarker, but they still look at you and are under no doubt that they would hate for this 'disease' to emerge in their own son. And they regard themselves as inherently biologically superior to you, because they are convinced you have an organic defect, even though they can't prove this. 99.999% of psychiatrists lose all powers of reason and critical thinking after they read their first psychiatry textbook as a student and actually accept that observing someone's behavior for fifteen minutes out of their life is enough to justify handing someone a lifelong cross to bear and robbing them of the joy and clarity of experiencing their unadulterated self ever again. 98% of people placed on mind altering drugs for decades, and told that they have a terrible disease and bad genes and no future and should live in terror of becoming ill again and again and again, are going to have bad outcomes, AND WHO TRUST AND BELIEVE THE SHRINKS TELLING THEM THIS AND COMPLY live a life of stressful overwhelm, physical health degradation, despair, sorrow, be more likely to drown these sorrows in available escapist substances, be less likely to respect and care for themselves after they are told every fiber of their humanity is merely nothing but a walking birth defect which society sees as abnormal, incurably diseased and disordered, inferior, and that they are member of a genetic underclass of pariahs, every individuals told these things, treated in this obscene manner, will live out their short lives, with each adverse event which litters their mangled futures being a statistical datum for you ideologues to wrap up into a neat little package you choose to call the study of a disease outcome, but what you are really witnessing play out in these stats is the systematic destruction of innocent human lives, who came to your 'science' for help, and left with tons of harmful baggage and hindrances in place of original short lived overwhelming distress. Next time you consider throwing the word 'ignorance' around you might consider Cairn, you might consider the myriad realities that this 'science' chooses to ignore. For the reality is psychiatry doesn't just push the observable aberrations of its drugs to the side and call them side effects, it pushes to the side all human dignity and sanctity of every single human ethic ever conceived, let alone every medical ethic. Gee, could it possible that what we are observing in the statistics is the slow unraveling of these poor people's lives who have been PROMISED by people identifying as medical experts that the outcome of the disease will be so experienced? Combined with the daily battles against debilitating drug effects, deadly stigma, an absence of hope taken away by the disease model itself? Could it be that given you can't diagnose this disease with anything but 'opinion' that it might be time to stop STOPPING young people in their tracks for life when they first present.??? Any shrink who calls themselves a member of a helping profession is deluded. You rote learners might be good fodder for engineering firms etc who need people to memorize evidence based knowledge, but the fact remains, mental health is one 'science' where ALL THE ASSUMPTIONS are built on shaky ground. And now that you're not actually cutting up our brains with knives, merely bloodletting a little serotonin here and there and indoctrinating us with ideology, some us are gonna survive, thrive and educate ourselves and know our enemy, and we are bringing the fight to your house. Seeing as though you brought it to my house. I'm not going to stop until I die. Psychiatry is a threat to public health, it's a threat to every major organ in the body. Psychiatry created the greatest dangers I was ever in during my entire life... and I am honor bound to explain to the world what happened when we turned over our concept of human distress to bunch of 'rote learners'. You wait and see what happens in China this century in psychiatry. China's the biggest rote learner populated place on earth. The lobotomies are already coming back. I expect widespread destruction to occur in china at the hands of psychiatry. Rote learners, understanding human distress since someone first decided to inject an industrial dye into the veins of a psychotic in the 40s. Cascade from there. Bloodletting, for the electron microscope age. When you were a baby, you didn't know what blood was, then you learned. Then you grew up and went to college, and you learned what we know about neurons. Then you chose a career where the law handed you psychotic patients with open access to their biology, where they had no right to refuse your alchemy, only trouble was, you don't know what the fuck is the cause of the distress you see before you. And you are inhumane as you push to the side the life stress of this person and view him as a malfunctioning caged animal in need of your 'medicine' which you don't even apply to a known organic defect. You're obscene killers. You nearly killed me. And you what that makes me? Angry. Focused. One Eyed. In hot pursuit. Compelled to act. Unafraid to die if I could save enough people. Hubristic rote learners who fail to see their arrogance and mangle outcomes like bulls in china shops, regardless of prestige, education, and power, are not human beings a civil society needs. Explain to me, before the 21st century is out, the neuromechanics of jealousy. Explain to me those of love. If I don't love my wife can I get some electric currents from an implant DBS style to help me love her more, be less jealous? Bottom line. Sure. We are biological organisms. Electrical activity as helping me type this blog comment. The most complex organ in existence will never be understood, even if we all put our heads together. To say we had this understanding in 1950, 1992, 1974, 2001, 2006, 2008 in any way shape or form, is intellectual dishonesty. To group the power of suggestion together in stats and say to the world 'the meds work, in some people, we don't know why, but they just work ok' is just the greatest, most deadly harmful fraud in the history of medicine BAR NONE. Most indoctrinated true believers of the psychiatric theology of disease etiology, treatment and outcomes, are too far gone to be reasoned with. In fact you are showing a severe weakening of reason if you identify as a mental health professional in the 21st century, because although there are living human beings earning money going to jobs in mental health, to use the word 'professional' is a stretch. What is it with humankind having a series of hallowed books which cause untold destruction? It seems to be a pattern. Maybe we are doomed to be under the control of books which are based on speculation and fairy tales, whether it be from the pulpit or behind the desk next to the zyprexa pens. Posted by: Poe at June 8, 2008 02:22 PMRight. But cholera is disease with a specific and measurable etiology. Find me "real" biological evidence for a mental disease first and then we can play math. Posted by: Paul at June 8, 2008 02:35 PM
It appears that our dear Biederman and Wilens may have bitten off more than they can chew! Posted by: valerie at June 8, 2008 07:48 PMPaul wrote: But cholera is disease with a specific and measurable etiology. Exactly. But in 1854 no one knew or believed this. The germ theory of disease didn't exist yet. Even after the cholera epidemic had subsided the Reverend Henry Whitehead, vicar of St Luke's church, Berwick Street, believed it was caused by divine intervention. Dr. John Snow had a theory that cholera was spread by contaminated water, which the authorities and medical establishment refused to believe outright. But after examining the physical evidence he concluded that the outbreak was linked to a single pump, noting "nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump." He finally convinced people to remove the pump handle as an experimental measure and wonderfully the cholera epidemic subsided immediately. He then followed up with individual cases that had no obvious connection to the pump. Every single person who had fallen ill had directly or indirectly taken water from that single pump. And groups of people who hadn't fallen ill who you might have expected to all had a good reason not to have been drinking from that pump at the time. One of my favourites is a group of workers in a brewery in the area who had a daily allowance of beer. Paul wrote: Find me "real" biological evidence for a mental disease first and then we can play math. You don't need to know or even understand the underlying biology of an illness in order to help people. Snow didn't need to know or understand germ theory to conclude that drinking water from contaminated sources is a bad idea. But the correlation between drinking water from a specific pump and contracting cholera was good enough from a medical stand point. After reading more of the posts and replies here it seems the real issue underlying everone's participation is power. There is a real resentment against the influence physicians and pharmaceutical companies have in their lives. And fair enough. I have the same concerns. But aside from Phil, there's very little of constructive value posted here. It's either vitriol for the medical establishment or venom for anyone who doesn't fall into this site's anti-establishment line. I mean, "play math"? Grow up. If there is something you don't understand then sit down and do the work required to understand it like the rest of us. Almost everyone here also seems to have missed out on the lesson of how introducing an ad hominem into your "argument" is the quickest way to demolish it. Even Phil trips up on that one. Posted by: cairn at June 9, 2008 03:11 AMIntersting reading, this commentary section. For what it is worth to any or all of the above commentators, give this comment some consideration: So, if you have a problem, can you resolve it on your own or with the help of sympathetic, supportive, stable others, or do you need more than that? That is what responsible mental health care is about, folks. It is just one man's opinion. Posted by: therapyfirst at June 9, 2008 08:41 AMCairn, I'm not sure that you realize the rage and pain that follow our psychiatric assaults. Insulting the participants of this forum doesn't help. The cholera analogy doesn't work. You make it sound as though psychiatry is just at its own "pre-germ theory" phase (to use your analogy) and will evolve to a full and complete understanding of mental illness and its cure. That's horseshit. Until we have scientifically credible diagnostic procedures and until we respond only to actual evidence rather than to Big Pharma-driven religion, this "science" will continue to go nowhere. Until then, there are precious few internet sites like this one. I enjoy reading Poe's contributions and I certainly understand the source of his anger and his point of view. Posted by: Francesca Allan at June 9, 2008 06:39 PM"You don't need to know or even understand the underlying biology of an illness in order to help people" Ok Cairn so lucky for you, when you experience love, jealously, pride, vanity, interest, a team of hundreds of thousands of statistician assholes aren't out there imprisoning you and experimenting on you to win a nobel prize. If you think human distress is best helped by tranquilizing people to the point where they can't use their god given cognitive function, and then ruining their confidence and hope in their self determination and future by telling them that their every mood and thought is the result of a terrible incurable brain disease that they can pass to their kids, then you yourself are a disease. If an authority asserts lifelong disease and dependence on prophylactics that are nothing but guesswork, and engenders fear and terror in its 'diagnosees' than you're not 'helping people' you're fucking harming them. I don't give a shit if you're the greatest rote learner mathematician in the history of man. You're talking about a science that consists of nothing but piles of studies about the outcomes of guesswork pharmacology, on subjective behaviors and problems in living, with 'patients' under the complete power of suggestion and guidance of ideologues and rampant biological determinists whose hubris is astronomical, and Maybe you are the one who should go away and do some reading. Maybe you should get to know and understand the human cost of destroyed lives put needlessly into suspended animation simply because they trusted those in authority to be reasonable helping professionals, instead of locked tight corporate backed ideologues with an agenda to push ever growing facets of the human experience into contrived symptoms of contrived diseases. This pre-germ theory is never going to wash. I don't think you understand the harm that it causes to medicalize human distress. It's dehumanizing and destroys lives. I also think you ought to be more respectful. Psychiatry survivors are the strongest individuals on the planet. They are shining examples of strength and courage, and in centuries to come will be recognized as such. It takes bravery, intelligence and strength to have the courage to stand alone, and overcome the grenades thrown at your life by this contrived pseudoscience. They are a rare breed. I'm pretty sure the average 'defer to authority at any cost' asshole like yourself, and you are an asshole coming on here using a cholera vignette, its just offensive, I'm pretty sure if you suffered some understandable human distress when you were young and then went on to be neurologically raped for thousands of days straight and have your identity crushed by being needless turned into a 'diseased' pariah by the psych model, you'd be fucking dead or disabled. Fancy coming on here with some 'authoritative' story about cholera. You're an obscenity. I'll ad hominem all I like because you're nothing if you're gonna come on here and tell me we should warehouse people for life, kill them young with drugs, end their family lines without evidence, and tell me "You don't need to know or even understand the underlying biology of an illness in order to help people". It's precisely the fact that you believe what you just said, and that there are hundreds of thousands of fools who also do in charge of human distress in this world, that we are in such dire straights. Posted by: Poe at June 9, 2008 08:08 PMCairn, I work in pharma in clinical research. I've sat through plenty of tables meetings to understand what "playing math" means - do you? You can't do anything real based on subjective questionnaires. It's complete BS and everyone knows the emperor's new clothes do fit quite so lovely. Posted by: Paul at June 9, 2008 09:37 PMcairn, You don't need to know or even understand the underlying biology of an illness in order to help people I see! While the biology is not understood let's prescribe drugs based on hypothesis. No! You've crossed the line. Where are the answers to my questions about statistics? It's hard to make numbers work your way sometimes! Using statistics as a way of understanding can be helpful. But using statistics to manipulate, and the depression campaign did it quite well, is a crime. I'm not understanding what are your priorities and it seems to me you're here just for fun and have nothing of value to say. The cholera association is nonsense to say the least. After reading more of the posts and replies here it seems the real issue underlying everone's participation is power. I beg your pardon? Here, in this post? LOL I see no reason why people are so concerned answering you. I've only read you comment because of the answers. Found nothing new on this approach. - "in modern times cairns are often erected as landmarks. In ancient times they were erected as sepulchral monuments, or used for practical and astronomical uses." -"(CAIRN) Canadian Autism Intervention Research Network" -"Welcome to the official home page of the Cairn Terrier Club of America. Here you will find information about the breed, about the club, and about affiliated ..." LOL No matter how many answers cairn will provoke I will not read it anymore. I was wondering if anyone knows about this site and what it offers: http://www.labelmesane.com/home.html I've had similar problems as everyone only involving amitriptyline (Elavil), one of the older tricyclic antidepressants. It's been very effective for me the times I've used it over the years, but coming off it seems to get worse the older I get (or the more times I use it?). I guess you're wanting to make a profile of yourself. But it doesn't fit! Goodbye cairn! Nossa! Que homem chato! LOL Paul wrote: I work in pharma in clinical research. I've sat through plenty of tables meetings to understand what "playing math" means - do you? Yeah, I do actually.Paul wrote: You can't do anything real based on subjective questionnaires. That's a pretty broad claim. Nothing is absolute. We do the best we can with what we have; what more is there? That doesn't make us evil.And I understand much of what is said here. I've dealt with manic depression the last 25 years. Multiple hospitalizations, overdoses, psychotic breaks, medication withdrawal, yada yada. And I've known a number of people who have gone through the same thing. You all know the score. But because I want to be able to read the literature and actually understand what is being published, I'm a pariah? LOL. Posted by: cairn at June 10, 2008 05:49 AMStatistics: DSM: if you go to a library you can find the first DSM. It was simply a handful of typewritten pages listing diangoses. It was very skimpy on aiding diagnosis, unlike how it has been from DSM-III on to the present. This was used to gather "statistics" - really, frequencies, of the psychiatric problems being treated in any given psych hospital or unit. Really just a census tool. The DSM-III was a big jump - it attempted to cover a lot more, and standardize things a lot more. It got invoked into billing a lot more. It attempted to be phenomenologically neutral: it had, and still has for the most part, nothing to say about whether a disorder is a "brain disease," the result of unresolved freudian conflicts, psychic attempts to make sense of an insane world, or any other etiological explanation. This goal has been limited in a couple areas, namely the categorization of 'organic' disorders (where it is pretty clear that anoxia at birth has led to some behavioral problem via compromised brain development), and ptsd, where some traumatizing event must have occurred before the appearance of ptsd symptoms. "Statisitics," as in a Baysian analysis of the likelihood or predictive probability that a teen smoker is likey to also have the bipolar, or the chi squared analysis, or logistic regression analysis, or Cramer's v, regarding the joint likelihood of smoking and bipolar, is a different kind of "statistics;" not census sampling but the likelihood that obtained results reflect the true underliying relation, versus being a chance occurrence. Yes, to analyze these issues, it is important that some of the analyzers be familiar with these techniques and underlying theory. Regardless, commonsense is always required. Are all teen smokers bipolar? Commonsense, people. Posted by: Row1 at June 10, 2008 07:09 AMRow1, DSM: Edition Date Diagnostics :)
Cairn, Who said anything about evil or pariahs? I'm fairly certain I didn't. I'm not quite following you thoughts here. Unless you are privy to the actual study data (unsummarized) you'll have a hard time analyzing anything. You'll never see how a suicide was coded as "some other useful euphemism" or how AEs are attributed to study drug or not. I'm fortunate to have a spouse that also works in clinical, but on the data side of things. I constantly hear of CNS being their biggest problem area. I've also heard firsthand other clinicians grumble about the need to get out of CNS altogether because of the placebo response rate, inadequate controls, and the utter uselessness of assessment tools. Literature pubs are JUST like sausages - you may prefer not to consume them only you know how it was made... A thorough review of Philip's Zyprexa document archive is a great place to start. Posted by: Paul at June 10, 2008 09:42 AMCairn says "I've dealt with manic depression the last 25 years. Multiple hospitalizations, overdoses, psychotic breaks, medication withdrawal, yada yada. And I've known a number of people who have gone through the same thing. You all know the score." Yeah I know the score Cairn. Your initial human distress, which would have had clear psychosocial or drug abuse causation, was blown way out of proportion by indoctrinated ideologues and you were told you had a lifelong biological brain disease, a genetic one at that. You trusted them and began to live your life as if this were true. Your brain suffered injury from guesswork meds, which going on and off, and combined with the stress from stigma and fear, caused the next psychosis. Never did any 'medical expert' see inside your brain, and you changed your entire life based on a checklist. You were had. The fact that you get on board and become just as 'religious' about the phony science that stole your good name and health is what makes you an unsavory person to deal with on here. I don't understand people who are so heavily invested in psych ideology that they will undermine others who have broken free. In the end, you can't say that if you were treated with psychosocial understanding, a trauma model, and not given a lifelong cross to bear, that you would have even had a second psychosis. "But because I want to be able to read the literature and actually understand what is being published, I'm a pariah? LOL. " You want to understand why you were even led to believe you had a brain disease in the first place. Pshrinks spend a life with their heads buried in the pseudoscientific studies, and in the end spend a 30 or 40 year career destroying lives and prolonging initial trauma for a person's lifetime. You ought to look at the reading list I provided previously on here. Prove the neurology defective before you spend time studying what happens in a study made up of a hundred people with nothing but a mere label and what happens to them when you chuck chemicals on their neurology!!! The 'experience' you think you have had of an 'illness' is nothing but the self fulfilling prophecy, the power of suggestion at work. Tell someone they have a 'mood disease' they start to take notice of their moods a little more. And combine that with decreased cognitive function due to the meds... I could easily understand how you would be under the impression that you 'experienced' years of mental illness. Psychiatry manufactures your experience. It is in their interest not to patch you up and leave you intact after your first psychosis. Society wants to keep tabs for life on anyone who becomes the untrusted psychotic, even once. Understanding in this issue wont come from journals. Wake up. Well, I've learned again. Never argue with crazy people. :) Posted by: cairn at June 10, 2008 12:21 PMcairn, please go review the comments policy on the about page. you've come quite close to violating it twice. Posted by: Philip Dawdy at June 10, 2008 01:28 PMHello Mr Dawdy, I'll tell you a story about bipolar teens who smoke. When I entered mental health services for major depression at age 14 I was sucked into the forces of psycho pharmacology and institutionalized living. Nine months later, after 72 days inpatient at a private psych facility and 6 months as a resident in a group home for disturbed teens I was a little stressed out. I entered foster care for a bit and within weeks I asked one of my friends to teach me to smoke. I asked my foster father why he smoked and he told me he smoked to relax. My mother smoked in the house growing up. My dad smoked, my grandparents and aunts smoked. It was what adults did to take a break from stress. I felt like an adult the first time I smoked an entire cigarette. Coming out of State run institutions with a bipolar label and some life experiences I did not care to share with anyone, I had a good reason to smoke. During the height of my bipolar stuff between age 18-20 I smoked almost 2 packs a day sometimes. Quitting smoking was very painful for me psychologically. It was like giving up an old friend. But I used smoking as a way to self injure too, and I felt better once I quit. Bipolar did not make me smoke Joe, it was being subject to *treatment* and the things that mental health pros did to me without my consent to treat my *bipolar* that was the last straw that got me started smoking. In fact, I use to be an anti-drug nazi as a teen before I was medicated against my will. Afterwards, as young adult, I had less inhibitions against becoming substance addicted since my Pdoc had already stolen my drug virginity from me. Psyche meds were my gateway drug Joe. Posted by: Jane at June 10, 2008 01:31 PMI meant crazy in the sense of being irrational, not in the pejorative. Posted by: cairn at June 10, 2008 02:10 PMIrrational? What do you mean by irrationality cairn? Perhaps crazy would be better! Once again, now in English: Gee! What a boring man! I've just found out that irrational is much more interesting than boring! But... what is the subject of this post?
The bright side of irrationality: "Irrational is not always viewed as a negative. The Dada and Surrealist art movements, for example, embraced irrationality as a means to "reject reason and logic". Andre Breton, for example, argued for a rejection of pure logic and reason which are seen as responsible for many contemporary social problems [1]. In science fiction literature, the progress of pure rationality is viewed as a quality which may lead civilization ultimately toward a scientific future dependent on technology. Irrationality in this case, is a positive factor which helps to balance excessive reason. In psychology, excessive rationality without creativity may be viewed as a form of self-control and protection. Certain problems, such as death and loss, may have no rational solution when they are being experienced. We may seek logical explanations for such events, when in fact the proper emotional response is grief. Irrationality is thus a means of freeing the mind toward purely imaginative solutions, to break out of historic patterns of dependence into new patterns that allow one to move on." Row1, Jane, I ask the people who are making the DSM-5 not to forget to diagnose: MHOB - Mental Health Obsession Disorder People who spend the entire day on FS and browsing around the Web searching data on Mental Health. cairn, your defense of the word crazy vs. irrational is absurd, it's equally as insulting,degrading, and unnecessary especially if you want to be taken seriously.just my opinion. Posted by: Stephany at June 10, 2008 10:28 PMErr Cairn believes psychiatry's version of his neurology. It's like arguing with a suicide bomber. You cannot argue with fanatics. Have fun reading the journals Cairn, hopefully you'll get a front row seat when the promised breakthroughs happen from your religious masters. There's something to be said about a guy who has more respect for his captors than his fellow slaves. Clearly, you're a study yourself, in indoctrination into psych ideology. Posted by: Poe at June 10, 2008 11:33 PMPoe, That's an interesting observation. I've seen Stockholm-like responses whilst I was an inpatient. It's hard to tell, but I suspect for many this was a facade to shorten their stay as much as possible. I'd say over half were inpatient from withdrawal issues - only they couldn't see past the mantra of the brain disease. One guy just simply ran out of seroquel (800 mg/day!) and flipped out. Still he was convinced it was his bipolar taking control and not an effect of abrupt discontinuation. BTW, the psychs did nothing to dissuade him of this falsehood... Very sad. Posted by: Paul at June 11, 2008 04:57 AMPaul says, "BTW, the psychs did nothing to dissuade him of this falsehood..." The hideous irony of this is that the psychs didn't even realize what was going on either. They're victims of the mantra of brain disease too (great expression by the way!). You'd think more than a handful of them might be bright enough to figure it out but I guess they have a lot to lose if they wake up to the truth of what's going on. Posted by: Sara at June 11, 2008 08:22 AMPost a comment
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