People who have been harmed by psychiatric medication blame the doctors who started them on it for their suffering. After years of struggling to free and heal ourselves without any help from the medical community we start to vilify those doctors. But as a doctor, you want to see yourself as a helpful healer. If …
“Make an appointment for your annual checkup” says the friendly celebrity on the TV. “And share with him everything you’re feeling physically and emotionally.” The world has been turned on it’s head. The economy is in the crapper. Unemployment is at levels not seen since the Great Depression. People are dying in droves from an …
Google the term antipsychiatry, and you get the following definition from Wikipedia: Anti-psychiatry is a movement based on the view that psychiatric treatment is more often damaging than helpful to patients. It considers psychiatry a coercive instrument of oppression due to an unequal power relationship between doctor and patient and …
Living in the great state of New Hampshire, home of the first in the nation presidential primary, those of us who are registered voters either with the party opposing the current incumbent or as undecided are bombarded, almost daily, with representatives of current candidates asking us about our “top priorities”. Since my husband relies on …
When I first sought help for depression, I was resistant to drugs. I thought it might just be an easy way out. After all I didn’t hallucinate like my mother and I wasn’t paranoid like my ex-husband. It wasn’t clear to me that I really “needed” the medications. Then the doctor explained that I had …
Even long after the medications had clearly stopped working for me, I was convinced they were the only reason I was still even marginally functional. Part of that was the way I had reacted on the occasions I went for more that a few days without out it. Vacillating between an inability to move and …
We saw in The Chemical Imbalance Myth that difficult emotions and even psychoses are not caused by any type of neurotransmitter imbalance in the brain. Their true cause is complex and unclear. That leaves us with a perplexing question. If psychiatric medications are not fixing a chemical imbalance in the brain, what are they doing? …
“You have a chemical imbalance in your brain that is causing you to feel depressed (or irritable, forgetful, etc.).” “You need to continue to take your Depakote to treat bipolar disorder just like a diabetic needs insulin.” I was told these things for years and operated under the infallibility of their truthfulness only to be …
Most days I struggle. It’s hard to sleep beyond first light, but even harder to force my body out of bed. The drugs have changed the way my brain functions, and the neurons and chemicals are valiantly trying to find their way back to natural balance. I have come far, I realize. From a high …
My early success with coming off the medications, led me to become more curious about psychiatry and its biological approach to emotional distress. If I could do so well for so long without the medications that someone with bipolar disorder “needed”, was I really bipolar? Did any of the psychiatric diagnoses I had been given …
