A 50 year record shows Antipyschotics do more harm than good

Open mind,

It's seems like you've really researched bio-pyschiatry's approach to SZ.

Just, good luck and I truly believe you're on the right track. You're one in a million.

Thanks Guest.

If schizophrenia did not attack my wife 5 years ago, I would never know how to spell the word “schizophrenia”.

Since then, I just read anything directly and indirectly related to schizophrenia to educate my self. I am still learning every day.

Cheers.

Open mind,

Oh, so it's been 5 years. No wonder that you state in some of your posts that you are seeing promising signs of recovery. A 5-year recovery period corresponds with the findings of the World Health Organisation studies into SZ where the "patient" does not take antipsychotics.

I wish we could get 100 schizophrenics that quit medication 20 years ago and 100 schizophrenics that stayed on medication for 20 years and show the public the difference. It is a disgrace to see the terrible state these people that have complied with standard treatment are now in; they are all near death. How dare these so-called professionals shorten people’s lives with their theories, experiments and quackery?

Understandably, people that recover from SZ seem to disappear and want nothing to do with the mental health system again. This makes it difficult to conduct such a demonstration as I wish would occur.


Cheers!

Hello Openmind

Thought I'd just mention binocular rivalry, in connection with everything you've discussed here. Have you heard of this? There are several good websites which explain it in more detail. Basically when you look at something the eyes alternate between which one is looking but when its not working quite right the movement between eyes is a bit sticky. This has been known about in relation to mental health issues for about the last fifty years. It's something that doctor obviously haven't thought to mention to people! What you said about similarity to waking dreams makes some sense in this context. If the eyes aren't working properly then maybe proper rem sleep isn't happening. I'd be interested to know what your wife thinks by the way.

The really ludicrous thing about this is that most eyesight difficulties like this can be solved by simple excercises and seeing if there is an underlying learning disability too. Have you also heard of something called scotopic sensitivity syndrome? It's reckoned that this is what Virginia Woolf actually probably had. Try looking at any pictures of her. Her eyes are very deep set. It looks as if she struggled to actually see. If she had had access to a really good optometrist it could have really helped her.

I'm sure knowledge about this could really alleviate or preclude altogether the need for neuroleptics in many cases. Out of interest, do neuroleptics have the same effect on people's eyes as alchohol. That is making them move apart from each other? This could be why they work as they do. To focus and concentrate you need to make your eyes come together and converge.

Keep up the good work and, by the way, I do agree it's important to look at the mechanics.

All the best to you both.

I am so happy to have seen the link for the book on Soteria. I had never heard of this and am going to see if I can find the book in my travels today . From reading the description and reviews I really got the feeling that this is very similar to the 'big' picture or vision I see for the ministry concept I have. It hits what I have been saying to anyone who will listen...that through caring and time the process of healing will happen and medications only make things worse and certainly do not make things better in the long run. I love the subtitle 'Through Madness to Deliverance'! I can't wait to get my hands on the book and do more research about Soteria now...thank you for the link! Also, wanted to ask about the theory about eyesight that was just mentioned. I will search the term when I have more time, but just wondering if there is anything you could recommend on this. I am curious if there is anything said about including having a 'lazy eye' in this research? I think what you said about Virginia Woolf is interesting since her name comes up in the lists of people who could have had bipolar. I still keep saying that even though these people in the past may or may not have had a 'mental illness'....they were still successful enough that we still admire and learn about them today. They still survived without SSRIs, etc! Ok...won't do the soap box speech today.... take care and have a good weekend!

Hi Stopthemadness and all out there

About binocular rivalry. The site I got the best info on was Psych Central - thats http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Binocular rivalry. The way I got to it was by looking up keywords like mental illness+eyes or schizophrenia+eyesight etc. You then have a choice of sites. Also yes I certainly think there is something in a lazy eye. When the eyes floats out in an accomodative reflex action obviously the focal point perspective is all changed by this movement and the brain has to start overcompensating. One thing to help with this is excercises that help to strengthen the eye muscles. Anything where you have to follow a moving object is a good idea. They have found with some sz that there is a tortion to one side of the brain and I personally wonder if this is connected with it. I also heard of a case of a sz who cured himself and came off medication completely by learning to play the piano. I would agree with this. Playing a musical instrument uses several types of memory and motor control and a very good way of keeping brain active. Also reading music is different from other reading as it is a visual spatial activity and you learn to remember what you have just played in short bursts so are constantly looking ahead and retracking. Also its very physical reading.

On the subject of reading, there is some evidence that with sz people find it difficult to read slowly along a line. I've done some literacy teaching also volunteered with mental health projects. I've honestly seen so many people who probably had a learning disability that went undiagnosed. I've since left this field as I just met too many co-workers including qualified nurses who wanted to explore "energies" and healing techniques. However not one person was knowledgeable or even interested in any science that could help a lot of their clients. Anyway that's my little rant. Hope this is helpful. Ask if you've got anymore questions.

I did a Google search about "Virginia Woolf". She had mental illness:

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), British novelist, also distinguished feminist essayist, critic, and a central figure of the Bloomsbury group.

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882 in London, as the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf was educated at home by her father, and grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate. Her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, her half sister, took her mother's place, but died two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. When her brother Toby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown. Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which would become central to activities of the Bloomsbury group.

From 1905 Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard Woolf and published her first book, The Voyage Out in 1915. In 1919 appeared Night And Day, a realistic novel set in London, contrasting the lives of two friends, Katherine and Mary. Jacob's Room (1922) was based upon the life and death of her brother Toby.

With To The Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. In these works Woolf developed innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women's experience and find an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is formed of a giant web of thoughts of several groups of people during the course of a single day.

During the inter-war period Woolf was at the center of literary Society. The Bloomsbury group was initially based at the Gordon Square residence of Virginia and her sister Vanessa.

Virginia Woolf's concern with feminist thematics are dominant in A Room Of One's Own (1929), which deals with the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers, and explores in the last chapter the possibility of an androgynous mind. Three Guineas (1938) examined the necessity for women to make a claim for their own history and literature. Orlando (1928), a fantasy novel, traced the career of the androgynous protagonist from a masculine identity within the Elizabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928. Woolf was also prolific as an essayist, publishing some 500 essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905.

After her final attack of mental illness Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941.

From: http://www.online-literature.com/virginia_woolf/
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/autho ... _Woolf.htm

I also did a Google search about “mental illness + eye”.

My understanding is that the subtle abnormalities in eye movements of schizophrenics are only the results of the illness. I am not surprised that schizophrenic patients have difficulty keeping their eyes focused on slow-moving objects. However, I am surprised that Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago did not know how to explain their findings.

I have never noticed any such eyes focusing problems from my wife when she is not in her hallucination state. In my opinion, two things might contribute to these researchers’ findings: 1). Antipsychotic drugs – made these patients as zombie-like; 2) the distraction from hallucination. When patients were in the hallucination state, they could not focus on the testing task.

The only thing that I could recall from my readings related eyes with hallucination is the Charles Bonnet Syndrome: when people with sight problems start to see things which they know aren’t real (visual hallucination).

Cheers.

Guest,

I would like to point out that no 2 "schizophrenic's" will have identical symptoms.

I am a diagnosed chronic SZ (bah) that never halluncinated either, visually or auditorally. That is until the medication started and I got really bad tardive dyskenisia. So then, to counter TD these quacks then prescribed Artane and Cogentin, the side effects of both these drugs is hallucinations. Look them up if you don't believe me.

My diagnosis of SZ pertained to my political beliefs and had nothing to do with hallucinations. All you need is some right wing quack to judge your left wing political beliefs as dellusional and "hey presto" your schizophrenic. I was forcefully drugged for years.

Until psychiatry develops a reliable lab test that can identify the etiology of SZ the whole mental health system is open to abuse like what I suffered. Of course, I do not believe SZ is a disease at all, but in the event of an abnormality in the brain is found for the cause of SZ two things will happen. One, psychiatry (which is in reality a mechanism of social control) will cease to exist as we will all be consulting neurologists. And secondly, the courts will be full of SZ litigants wrongfully diagnosed as SZ under this current system of idealogical judgements of normal/abnormal behavior made by these quacks (social control agents).

PS: we are all still waiting for psychiatry to identify a neurochemically balanced personality. We will see pyschiatric ideaology at it's best the day they are forced to identify the sane, normal model person. I wonder how nhilists will fair with their complete denial of all established authority and institutions. What will happen if the Pope and the nhilists share the same neurochemistry? Now theres one to ponder?

stopthemaddness,

An organisation I am involved in has a funding application being processed at present in view to set up a respite center very similar to the Soteria project.

It's very exicting and we will know the outcome early next year.

I will be working there (as I am a recovered SZ) if all goes well.