"Anti-Psych" Forum

njw36 wrote:5. People without a chemical imbalance are harmed when they are presented with these medications, and the reason is the financial benefit of the pharmaceutical companies.

njw36 wrote:3. Medications do help people with a chemical imbalance when not much else would.

njw36 wrote: I'm just saying that medication can help some people recover who otherwise wouldn't.

The Mystery
The modern era of psychiatry is usually said to have begun with the introduction of Thorazine into asylum medicine in 1955. This kicked off a “psychopharmacological revolution,” or so our society is told, with psychiatry discovering effective drugs for mental disorders of all kinds. In 1988, the first of the “second-generation” psychiatric drugs--Prozac--was introduced, and these new drugs were said to represent another therapeutic advance. Yet, even as this “psychopharmacological revolution” has unfolded over the past 50 years, the number of people disabled by mental illness has soared.

In 1955, there were 355,000 adults in state and county mental hospitals with a psychiatric diagnosis. During the next three decades (the era of the first generation psychiaric drugs), the number of disabled mentally ill rose to 1.25 million. Prozac arrived on the market in 1988, and during the next 20 years, the number of disabled mentally ill grew to more than four million adults (in 2007.) Finally, the prescribing of psychiatric medications to children and adolescents took off during this period (1987 to 2007), and as this medical practice took hold, the number of youth in America receiving a government disability check because of a mental illness leapt from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007 (a 35-fold increase.)

The Investigation
The astonishing increase in the disability numbers during the past fifty years raises an obvious question: Could the widespread use of psychiatric medications--for one reason or another--be fueling this epidemic? Anatomy of an Epidemic investigates that question, and it does so by focusing on the long-term outcome studies in the research literature. Do the studies tell of a paradigm of care that helps people get well and stay well over the long term? Or do they tell of a paradigm of care that increases the likelihood that people diagnosed with mental disorders will become chronically ill?

The Documents
This website is designed to provide readers of Anatomy of an Epidemic with access to the key studies reviewed in the book. http://robertwhitaker.org/robertwhitake ... demic.html

Psychiatry's “treatments”often don't work. Even the industry shills will admit to that; however, all logic stops there. They will then continue to preach compliance with the same ineffective course of action despite the fact that, the evidence from the past 50 years has shown that the treatments have actually worsened long-term outcomes. There is an epidemic of psychiatric disability. How can this be, if the treatments are so much better that they were in the past? You are better off having a “psychotic” episode in Nigeria than in the U.S. Why? Because third-world countries have better recovery rates for so-called “schizophrenia” than the United States and other industrialized nations that keep their psychiatric patients “maintained” on the drugs. In the United States, one “psychotic” episode will almost always land you in psychiatric wasteland for the rest of your life. It is psychiatry itself that created the “chronicity” in so-called “mental illness” http://web.archive.org/web/201206070109 ... press.com/

Copy_Cat wrote:What if you have six people showing symptoms of mental illness and you know statistically that psychiatric drugging is going to help two of them and harm 4 of them, what do you do ?

Copy_Cat wrote:[

That's great but the problem is its preventing a greater number of people from recovering that otherwise would have.

Mentally ill do better in Third World than in West... People who suffer from schizophrenia in the Third World are twice as likely to recover as sufferers in the West, according to a report by the World Health Organization...

The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. The general form of the problem is this: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

What if you have six people showing symptoms of mental illness and you know statistically that psychiatric drugging is going to help two of them and harm 4 of them, what do you do ?

njw36 wrote:then any medication to prevent their positive psychosis would be helpful. This isn't about a third-world country.

Psychiatric drug dependence (addiction) and withdrawal reactions

All psychiatric drugs have the potential to cause withdrawal reactions, including the antidepressants, stimulants, tranquilizers, antipsychotic drugs, and “mood stabilizers” such as lithium. When the individual’s condition grows markedly worse within days or weeks of stopping the psychiatric drug, this is almost always due to a withdrawal reaction. However, misinformed doctors and misled parents, teachers, and patients think this is evidence that the individual “needs” the drug even more when what the patient really needs is time to overcome the drug’s contrary effects on the brain and body. http://www.breggin.com/index.php?option ... &Itemid=66

njw36 wrote:I, myself, am capable of saying which drugs help me function and which make me worse.

Psychiatric drugs, and all other drugs that affect the mind often spellbind the individual by masking their adverse mental effects from the individual taking the drugs. If the person experiences a mental side effect, such as anger or sadness, he or she is likely to attribute it to something other than drug, perhaps blaming it on a loved one or on their own “mental illness.” Often people taking psychiatric drugs claim to feel better when in reality their mental life and behavior is impaired.

Medication spellbinding explains why so many people keep taking harmful psychiatric drugs, and other psychoactive substances, while only getting worse and even ruining their lives,” says Dr. Breggin. “The concept of medication spellbinding clarifies why people thinking they are better on Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa, Xanax, Abilify, Seroquel, Zyprexa or other medications when their lives are deteriorating. Understanding medication spellbinding can help to free you and your loved ones from enslavement to psychoactive drugs of all kinds,” Dr. Breggin concluded. http://www.braindisablingtreatments.com ... nding.html

njw36 wrote:there must be some way to differentiate between people who benefit from taking the drugs and those who do not.