Two questions...

Got two questions that have been eating at me:

Do you believe it's possible to tell if someone has schizophrenia just by looking at them or talking to them briefly?
An old *very #######5 should be fired* psych I had told me that. She said she could tell right when someone walks in the room if they have schizophrenia or not.

Do people find you sometimes hard to get along with?
My family says I am 'controlling,obsessive and have a personality that change change in seconds', and they keep saying they want to know whether it's part of schizophrenia or not.

Lucitania wrote:Got two questions that have been eating at me:

Do you believe it's possible to tell if someone has schizophrenia just by looking at them or talking to them briefly?
An old *very #######5 should be fired* psych I had told me that. She said she could tell right when someone walks in the room if they have schizophrenia or not.

Do people find you sometimes hard to get along with?
My family says I am 'controlling,obsessive and have a personality that change change in seconds', and they keep saying they want to know whether it's part of schizophrenia or not.

I'm pretty good at spotting people that are taking antipsychotic medication, there a dead give away (poor buggers). All those side effects and stuff make it pretty easy to spot them. This maybe what that quack is refering too. She sounds dangerous to me. Tell her she should concerntrate on finding the biological marker for schizophrenia instead of using such an unscientific method. I would have called her an incompetant twat and walked out.

It was definately hard to get along with my parents, a lot of my behavior that they reported to my shrink as symptoms of SZ went away when I moved out and lived on my own. It's funny how your parents can make you behave when your young and rebellious.

I should have walked out...That lady was a quack, she looked drugged up herself.
So there aren't such things as schizophrenia 'personality traits'?

i saw a pdoc once who seemed very knowledgeable. he didnt say he could tell off the bat but he did say he worked best talking one-on-one to patients and by just getting to know them could figure out what they most likely had illness-wise.

he did tell me i was prolyl bipolar, tho personally i think im schizaffectiv (mostly mood disorder tho).

cableart wrote:i saw a pdoc once who seemed very knowledgeable. he didnt say he could tell off the bat but he did say he worked best talking one-on-one to patients and by just getting to know them could figure out what they most likely had illness-wise.

he did tell me i was prolyl bipolar, tho personally i think im schizaffectiv (mostly mood disorder tho).

That's how psychiatrists make their diagnosis by what you say and how you react to the prompts they give during the dialogue they engage you in.

It's not scientific at all. But just from talking to you, with no diagnostic test like a blood, tissue, xray, scan...., they end up guessing you have a mental illness with a specific chemical imbalance. What a load of crap!

The Rosenhan study showed just how accurate psychiatric diagnosis is.

"Rosenhan's study consisted of two parts. The first involved the use of healthy associates or 'pseudopatients', who briefly simulated auditory hallucinations in an attempt to gain admission to 12 different psychiatric hospitals in 5 different states in various locations in the United States. The second involved asking staff at a psychiatric hospital to detect non-existent 'fake' patients. In the first case hospital staff failed to detect a single pseudopatient, in the second the staff falsely detected large numbers genuine patients as impostors. The study is considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

No wonder medical doctors say psychiatry as the least respected medical specialty.

well guess i agree - in fact the pdoc admitted he worked in his field as an artist more than a scientist! in that respect i think he admits imperfection. because we do not know exactly what is right or wrong inside a sick brain, i think u hav to giv someone the benefit of a doubt. and tho i may know more bout myself and know a great deal about illness just from what ive read online, i would go to a pdoc to get diagnosis simply because they hav seen much more of symptoms from all kinds of people than i ever will. it is someone with experience you hav to trust.

cableart,

The problem with psychiatry is its obsession with the bio-chemical model (the theory mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances) which has never been proved.

Psychiatry refuses to look at other causes of mental illness such as environmental, cultural, social, economic factors that are very likely causes. This is because there is a Billion-dollar industry propping up the bio-chemical model, if you ask me it's corrupt.

When I look at (WHO) World Health Organisation studies in poorer countries where psychiatrists don't operate because of geographical and financial reasons. And people diagnosed with schizophrenia don't take anti-psychotic meds or see psychiatrists; and these schizophrenics in these poorer countries have a recovery rate of 2/3rds compared to the USA where your chances of recovery is very poor, I start to question the bio-chemical model. In the USA and other Westernised Countries where the bio-chemical model is used, schizophrenics are prescribed brain damaging anti-psychotic medication have very poor outcomes, very few people recover.

When these WHO studies were released, Westernised psychiatry were astounded and said it can't be right so the WHO did the studies again under stricter conditions and came up with the same result!

Westernised psychiatry has its fists down the pockets of the drug companies and prefers the money the bio-chemical generates to looking at the facts that the WHO has found.

I certainly will not see a psychiatrist or believe anything they say until they abandon their alliance with drug companies and this unproven hypothesis that mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances.

I'm schizophrenic. I take 5 deiffent meds but I need them cause I go crazy without them.

I take geodon and seroqel. Nothing helped till I started with the meds. And some other meds to help me go to sleep, and to relieve tenion during the day.

guest - you say psychiatrists hav an alliance with the drug companies. sounds a lot like liberal speculation to me. there is no one drug corporation - its at least a couple companies competing to make money by making lives better. the psychiatrists hav influence becuz they make money by making lives better, but they're actually working out in the field and get to choose which companies they go to according to what they see from patients.

whether you want to admit it or not, there are people who DO feel they need relief and find it from these medications. perhaps not the rescue ship one needs to save themselves from "drowning," but it's a good life preserver until we can one day figure out where exactly their neurons get mixed up.

there's too many factors differentiating first and third world countries to account for - certainly enough to make it impossible to solely blame psychiatry.

How Drug Company Money Has Corrupted Psychiatry
by Loren R. Mosher, M.D.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the nationwide organization to which most psychiatrists belong. In some ways it is a trade union. A large proportion of its income is from drug company advertising in its journals and newspaper. It also receives "unrestricted educational grants" and convention revenue from drug companies. Drug company sponsored symposia and exhibitions dominate the two major annual psychiatric conventions. Of course, the symposia speakers are paid handsomely for their half-day appearances. In my opinion, the APA is so dependent on pharmaceutical company support that it can not afford to criticize the overuse and misuse of psychotropic drugs. Perhaps more importantly, the APA is unwilling to mandate education of psychiatrists about the the seriousness of the short and long-term toxicities and withdrawal reactions from the drugs.
The drug companies pay speakers ($1000-2000 per appearance) who give psychiatric grand rounds and/or evening speeches (dinner provided by the company) to local psychiatric societies. Speakers come from lists of psychiatrists who will basically endorse their products. Doctors training to be psychiatrists are specially targeted for these speakers.
The drug companies give contracts to university based and private psychiatric research companies to conduct drug trials that are required for U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the drugs they sell. The company provides the protocol and the researcher may receive as much as $40,000 per patient that completes the study. This allows the drug company considerable influence on the way the drug studies are conducted. All of these drug manufacturer activities have increased in scope and intensity since the introduction of newly patented drugs, beginning with Prozac in 1989. They must reap the profits before patents run out.
Research protocols used in studies of psychiatric drugs required for the approval of the FDA are supposed to be reviewed by Institutional Review Boards (IRB's) to be sure they do not pose undue risks to the study subjects. Members of these boards have been found to be highly paid consultants to drug companies whose protocols they review. That is, they have obvious conflicts of interests and are not objective, unbiased reviewers of the psychiatric drug studies over which they pass judgment. The latest "novel" anti-psychotic drug that has been approved by our federal drug regulatory agency (FDA) is Zeldox, which the FDA allowed to be introduced to the US market despite Zeldox's dangers.
In my view American psychiatry has become drug dependent (that is, devoted to pill pushing) at all levels - private practitioners, public system psychiatrists, university faculty and organizationally. What should be the most humanistic medical specialty has become mechanistic, reductionistic, tunnel-visioned and dehumanizing. Modern psychiatry has forgotten the Hippocratic principle: Above all, do no harm.

THE AUTHOR, Loren R. Mosher, holds a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.D., with honors, from Harvard Medical School, where he subsequently received his psychiatric training. He is now Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, and Director of Soteria Associates, 2616 Angell Avenue, San Diego, Calif. 92122, (858) 550-0312, Fax (858) 558-0854. See www.mosher-soteria.com.