Survivors of Psychiatry

My Story I tried to commit suicide for the first time when I was 15. I spent my 16th birthday locked up in Dammasch State Mental Hospital, I freaked out when I was told I was going to have to stay so my clothes were ripped off me, by male aids and I was thrown naked in a real padded room… hint they are NOT padded. The light was on all the time and nothing was provided for cover to keep warm. I remember seeing men looking at me and I remember pictures being taken thru the peek hole window. I was in that room, with meals shoved thru a slit in the door for 3 days. The toilet was a hole in the floor and no, there wasn’t any toilet paper. . While at the “hospital”, I remember being put in a strait jacket and tied into a chair and my “meds” forced down my throat. When I realized I could vomit them back up I was sedated and given drugs via an IV. I woke up to being raped. I made friends with one gal, she was 14. She had ( I know know as ) anorexia. I watched her try and try and try to eat. She died. Another person I made friends with hung himself and died. The psy dr said I was on the schedule for shock treatments since I refused to co-operate with the rules and the staff. That scared the shit outta me. I started doing all the things I was supposed to do and 3 months later I was released.. cured. Nothing was different for me, except I learned how to manipulate people to get what I wanted. I HATED that feeling so I never took “advantage” of that “skill”.. Remember I had just turned 16.In my early 20’s I tried to commit suicide again and committed to another hosp in Vancouver WA with a DX of Manic Depression. I was on a cocktail of lithium, stelazine, tofranil chloral hydrate and a few others I can’t remember the names of .. for more than 7 years I saw a psychiatrist until my divorce and my insurance ran out. Dumped to fare the best I could into the mental health system for the poor I quit all my drugs cold turkey.It was while under the Dr’s care I read a book he recommended called Self-Talk. I believed I was sick with metal illness(es?) until I read that book. For the first time I heard no one can make me feel anyway at all unless I choose to let them. That my responses to life were totally under my control and direction ALL of them. I was 32. I’ve attempted suicide or came very very close to it 6 times in my life. Finally I asked myself, self, I’m smart enough to have gotten the job done so whats REALLY going on? I figured out WHY I kept diving into the back hole. I really do walk a different, road now thanks to getting the message my subconscious kept sending me. Thats been my experience with the Mental Health system. I am continually agast and appalled at the amount of drugs being forced onto people, particularly children, We adults have been fed a line of BS for so long about depression that it’s destroying us as a nation and no one can see it. ...

The recent publicity surrounding the Justina Pelletier case has focused attention, not only on the spurious and arbitrary nature of psychiatric diagnoses, but also on the legitimacy and appropriateness of mental health commitments. It is being widely asserted that these archaic statutes are fundamentally incompatible with current civil rights standards, and the question “should mental health commitments be abolished?” is being raised in a variety of contexts. CRITERIA ...

On January 27, NPR ran a short piece on a new treatment for clubfoot. Here’s a quote from the transcript: "Just a decade ago, up to 90 percent of babies…were treated with surgery that usually had to be repeated several times. That created a buildup of scar tissue that often left patients with a lifetime of chronic pain, stiffness, arthritis and medical bills. But with the help of a simple, noninvasive solution and an Internet campaign led by parents, the course of treatment and likely outcomes have changed completely." ...

Yesterday, December 26, at 8:25 p.m., the following comment was posted on my December 16 post on the Murphy Mental Health Bill. "Read the article in today's Wall Street Journal (12/26/13), 'A Mental-Health Overhaul', and you cannot help but be in favor of the Murphy Bill. It is a huge misrepresentation to say it is about 'coercive tactics'. Take the bill piece by piece and debate it. If you have experienced the mental healthcare system you would recognize that this legislation is badly needed and long over due." ...

It is no secret that pharma-psychiatry has come under considerable criticism in recent years. In general, they do not respond to these criticisms, but instead they continue to beat the same old drum: mental illness is becoming increasingly prevalent; we need more mental health screenings; we need more funding for “treatment”; and we need wider coercive powers to ensure that these sick people take their drugs. They are also using the school shootings to generate alarm about “untreated” mental illness, and are calling in support from various quarters, including politicians. ...

I found the above image online yesterday, at the site The Things We Say. Mental illness is also man-made. It is the invention of psychiatry - their spurious medicalization of all significant problems of thinking, feeling, and/or behaving. Its purpose is to legitimize the prescription of dangerous psychotropic drugs to as many people as possible. It benefits psychiatrists and drug companies, but damages, stigmatizes, and disempowers its victims. ...

In hospital ED records from 2007, there is a mention made by a doctor who was dictating his activities, observations of and involvement with me during 5 hours, that I am a"poor historian." Ironically, I have to this day never met with or even seen this doctor, and vice versa. The conclusion was followed by a little post-script stating that he wouldn’t know me from Adam if he saw me, despite having written the entire account of me from the first person perspective. Really, I provided very little history, because I wasn’t really asked, (something I figured was attributable to the hospital records department having in its own filed the most substantial majority of records and historical accounting from me, having been in an adult intensive outpatient program for two years, following a month long inpatient procedure, and after the two years of intensive, was still an outpatient scheduling check-in and progress check-up on a more casual schedule over six months … right up to the day that all information pertaining to me became non-existent, and new diagnoses, and history of the new diagnoses were filled in. I was not, however, even examined under any terms that might pass for making an effort to actually determine a diagnostic impression, no evaluation nor anything close was performed, but my previously [assumed] diagnosis for which I had been seeing a private doctor regularly, being monitored on medications and therapy for Bi-Polar II (actually it was never diagnosed, I was being treated for “target symptoms,” which were actually the result of a tardive syndrome induced by olonzapine -cycling between moderate to mild akathisia and fatigue resulting from it) , but records would have shown enough target symptom treatment to inform that I was Bi-Polar II. Bi-Polar [any] was R/O in the newly made that day diagnoses: Psychosis NOS R/O BI-POLAR, and Schizophrenia with history of Schizophrenia (that was the info written in by the phantom Doctor who divined these from no disclosed resource (perhaps Spiritual PhytoEssencing that randomly penetrates his 5th and 6th Chakra in the form of Sound-Thought Ethereal Essence guiding his knowledge, or maybe he was told to write up something for em stat purposes only w/o any responsibility for or contact with the patient, as he noted at the end). It’s curious that in my medical history and records, it was first recognized that I am a “Poor Historian.” What makes me a poor historian in effect today (my records and history are so toxic and viral, far beyond errors, that to allow for them to be transmitted to any new health provider w/o undergoing a major audit and revision into something that seems like it can pass meaningful use muster, would probably direct a well-intentioned but lethal course of treatment, in addition to being a DANGER TO SHIPPING). ...

On September 21, the Guardian/Observer (UK) ran an online article by Vaughan Bell titled Changing brains: why neuroscience is ending the Prozac era. Thanks to Paul Mace on Twitter for the link. The gist of the article is that although the use of psycho-pharmaceutical products is at an all-time high and is still rising in most parts of the world, the psychiatric promise of drug-induced happiness may be at, or close to, its peak. ...

On September 12, Jeffry Lieberman, MD, President of the APA, posted an article on Psychiatric News titled IPS to Feature Patrick Kennedy, Celebrate Community Psychiatry. The article is a preview of an APA conference scheduled for October 10-13 in Philadelphia: “Transforming Psychiatric Practice, Reforming Health Care Delivery.” Dr. Lieberman tells us that he is very excited about the conference, and that the theme is particularly relevant "…given the changes we are experiencing in the profession and some of the exciting program events that I hope will support APA’s goal of being in the forefront of changes in the profession under health care reform." ...

The book Madness Contested has recently been published by PCCS Books. It’s a collection of articles, edited by Steven Coles, Sarah Keenan, and Bob Diamond. The book is a remarkable piece of work. It covers just about every contentious concept in the present “mental illness” debate, and brings to bear an abundance of new insights and up-to-date research findings. There are 21 articles plus an introduction by the editors. Here’s the name of each article with a brief quotation from each: ...