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I learned a lot from this. Thank you
Yeah in echoing the same
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Thank you!
I feel like I need to be reminded of this often even though this is something I can be kind of preachy about.
I still feel validated to know that my depression is just a response to challenges in life; it didn’t crop up out of nowhere for no reason.
At times that helps me feel more light and in touch with reality. Or more sober with reality…
However, its nice to get on the ride of getting medication and all that because it can feel a bit relieving too. Like it feels like people are being compassionate… until you start getting flak for being lazy and wanting help and all that…
That’s when it feels necessary to sort of turn on the light to see what’s really going on and when symptoms really started and what might still be happening that you don’t really feel good about.
Thanks. That is good information.
I am on Paxil 20mg because of my panic- attacks. I still get them though! So I don’t believe the drug is working.
They are cheap and I have been taking them for a couple of years now, so no need to quit them. I don’t want the “discontinuing” syndrome or what’s it called??
If I ever recover from this illness I’ll quit them.
ADs caused so much harm to me. They changed my whole mood, my outlook on life, my fear levels, my personality, to the negative. And I wasn’t even depressed when I started them. Just in a bad situation.
It is against my morals to use medication ever since (without judging others, just for me). Doctors lied over there not being side effects and withdrawals. They harmed me. And they did so willfully. So any medication or doctor I can avoid, I avoid. There are times I cannot. And I’m sometimes even doubting to restart an AD, when I’m in the “very severe depression” category that supposedly is helped by them. But I just…after all the lying they did, I find it very hard to turn to them for help. And hand them my money. All the above was known to them, and I asked, and there was no informed consent.
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If you want more of an idea of how antidepressants can work then this is an interesting elaboration.
I’m personally not fan of using the predominantly biological model of scz outside the context of medication and research. It isn’t helpful in the context of labelling a person with a chronic mental illness outside of the bounds convincing them to take medication. Labels are often used to communicate information between doctors, get funding or accommodations for illness and to help develop a sense of insight or understanding itself in the patient. Schizophrenia spectrum style thinking skews towards mentalising and tangential understanding/connections. Confering sensitivity towards stimulus. The social model is a lot more strong in depression then it is in scz. Evolutionary and social models of depression would make you think that depression could be a sensitivity towards the environment. The role of medication in depression is such that doctors don’t have the time to unwind all the psychosocial factors in the environment that are leading towards your depression. Also patients my either have the inability or lack will to change environmental factors leading towards depression. Because one of primary features definiting depression is that it is a brain state that skews towards seeing negative outcomes you can’t logic or reason you way out of depression. It isn’t an optimal state of affairs to give people a medication so that they can then go on towards having the ability to solve the lifestyle factors causing depression. Yet a doctor or clinician can’t walk around with you all day to enter a form of cbt and pick apart the true causes of your depression. Paramagnetically giving a pill means that there is something always with them always inside of them biologically which is shaping and changing their world view towards a more corrective/adaptative response. It is true that we live in a depressogenic society but it is also wrong to blame society. Society exists as it does and while we can argue and advocate for creating a less economically centric and more humanist society by things like a 4 day work week. The argument is asinine. Depending on your beliefs towards social welfare one could argue the economic loss of depression also. I think sociall it is the responsibility of people and therefore society to pick others up when they fall down. The current state of affairs means that it doesn’t really extend much beyond giving people a pill. It is important for people to understand that unless you fix the lifestyle factors that cause your depression and or they otherwise disappate during the time of the antidepressant use then it’s a band aid fix. You only ever really take antidepressant medication to enable you to pick yourself up and start working on everything else in your life.
It is a shame that you have become disenfranchised by the medical system and psychiatry because medication is the conerstone of treatment in scz. Just because doctors can often present impersonal, calculating and detatched especially in inpatient units, does not mean they intended to decieve you or that they still don’t have your interests in mind or that they don’t want to help you. On the contrary the large majority of doctors become so because amongst other things they want to help. It is easy to confuse these ideas in paranoid thinking styles. It is also the case that if you have a negative experience then you judge the situation by the degree to which you felt the experience was negative which makes sense but it doesn’t say anything about the statistical chance of you have such side effects.
It is also true that there are good people and bad people wherever you go. Just because someone has a medical qualification doesn’t mean that they are going to help you. Imo it’s hard to find good doctors.
Hey, oh, it is not that I distrust all individual doctors or am paranoid about them. My current doc is a kind person. I do think many psychiatrists are very arrogant and not very good at understanding social and emotional problems though. And they lied. I asked them about harmful effects and they consistently lied. Perhaps to themselves as well.
It is more though…I do not believe in the system. And the way it phrames social and psychological problems like psychosis. I think their whole way of understanding people is wrong. And thus their solutions. I do not believe in their neurotransmitter theories. Perhaps also because in me, there were such clear other factors…like diet and trauma.
It is true that they cannot help everyone in the way that is needed, for lack of time etc. But they could at least try. By not blocking access to therapy, by looking into diet, by helping change abusive situations. I see a change in the younger docs though. Where they are less of a hinder to recovery.
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Yeah I have also found psychiatrist a very arrogant bunch.
That perspective makes complete sense in context.
How do feel you were lied too though? Things like concealment of the truth, malicious intent & ulterior motives. Sound congruent with a paranoid thinking style. Not saying the they weren’t wrong in what they did, I’m not deny that evidently the didn’t help you and damaged you. Just from the outside and without understandings the exact circumstances of the events the framing does sound extreme. Having been involuntarily hospitalised myself these experiences make sense to me and at one point I felt exactly the same way. The mental health system takes a lot of power away from the individual who is need of care and compassion. Yet it can be important to develop metacognition, introspect and have insight.
I’m a big believer that it’s necessarily what you say so much as how you say it. The better you can recover the further you can distance yourself from the mental health system the less traumatised you will feel by it. The better you can express and articulate your view point including the failures of the system and the awareness around those failures, in a way which is unfortunately authenticated and conducive to societies expectation the less stigmatised you will feel.
Beyond the boundaries of this discussion it is important to realise that you can believe in god or that covid was man made but you can’t be overly concerned about being watched by the government and intelligence agencies. I mean the distinction is ultimately small, the point is that there are acceptable and non acceptable delusions. It is about communicating the information such that your view point is accepted as valid, the criteria of what actually looks and further what actually is crazy is less important. In full view your response (psychological and biological) to an extreme situation is it rationale run aberrant.
The trauma generated by the mental health system is unilaterally a bad thing, we all agree that. Trauma doesn’t make you a better person because of it. It wrong to say that it make you stronger. Yet as a suvivor of any experience it is important to reframe the experience in such a way that it no longer causes you pain for yourself. Maybe there is a lesson to be learnt for it and there can be personal growth from facing adversity. There are good learning experiences and then there are very bad learning experiences. There is always something to take away from a situation you just have to look for the positives in it and you will find them.
Thanks for your response. I think I tend to express myself (sometimes) in more black and white terms than I actually see it. Because of the effects this had on not only me, but also my kid and family, which hurts. And in pain, people (me) speak more black and white sometimes. I see for example, there is a complex interplay between biological and psychological factors in psychosis…I just feel the latter is very underappreciated in the current system.
I think it is not paranoid. In the sense that I f.e. explicitly asked nurses/doctors about certain harmful effects. And they explicitly denied well-known facts. E.g. told me APs are 100% safe and have only ever got minor side effects, which is bullcrap. Or told me ADs have no side effects or withdrawals. Or that benzodiazepines are not addictive at all.
These are untruths. And any good doctor or nurse knows that. I’m not sure about their intent. I think…it wasnt so much malicious, as rather…doctors are people. People do not like to admit to themselves they do harm. And much less to others. Also, they may have wished to convince me to use medication by conceiling the facts “in my own benefit”. For me, this worked exactly in the opposite way: what they told me disagreed with the facts and my experiences. Thus, I could not trust their words.
I do think it is important to find a way to deal with what happened. I hope there is a way to grow from it still.
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23 years on tem
I have Heard Mental Illness Has No Thing To do With Harmonal Imbalance …
I dont Know For Sure …
Super underappreciated especially in schizophrenia.
Yeah a lot of the time nurses and doctors can be pretty blunt. Part of the job is also just to convince you to take the medication. A lot of them will be worn out by high volume patient loads. They should do better to spend time with patients and properly address their concerns and alleviate any of their worries in regard to treatment. It is pretty common for psychiatric treatment to be involuntary and then this blurs the line as doctors basically aren’t wasting time arguing with someone who is involuntary. I think insight into accepting illness is also a problem with the actual classification and diagnosis of mental illness. Most disease processes are diagnosed based upon etiology and pathogenesis but in mental illness it is diganosed by symptomatology. Structured clincal interview and presentation on symptomatology is therefore hard to communicate to patients and there are no clear biomarkers. I think it kind of remains the case that if you need to be able to convince people of the need for treatment and why a treatment works. Following from that the risks involved in treatment. The reality is that many doctors could to better in information communication and patient relations especially in psychiatric care settings. The experience is pretty dehumanising.
Entirely possible if not common practice they skipped having an informed discussion with you about it because the were time poor and or didn’t know how to put forward a good argument about the risks and benefits. They just assume that the science say the benefits outweigh they risks and then force medication upon people. That’s the pretty standard dogma. It make sense when you’re very deep into experiences of psychosis that there are instances where involuntary admission are a valid evil. Yet the main reason why someone will or won’t take something such as a drug that a patient essentially has no idea and no available information about is the trust that a person put in the doctor infront of them. The way the system works definitely doesn’t instantly instill you with trust in it and the whole experience can be traumatic if not in cases abusive. Being under the thumb of the mental health system is pretty terrible and the power dynamics in the patient doctor relationship are pretty broken.
This remains pretty true
Yeah it’s okay to disagree but it’s never a good idea to invalidate other people lived experience and truth. Especially for doctors in a care position. Sometimes when it stands in opposition with the model that they work under it is hard to have an objective view towards it. The psychiatrists who didn’t believe in the practices and care of a hospital are probably more likely to have moved away from it. So I personally feel it is kind of the case that you find better care from private specialist care settings. If you are speaking to a psychiatrist about experiences which are in opposition to both the science and their profession then will probably more likely disregard you, rather affiliate with your statements and convince you of otherwise. You aren’t going to find many psychiatrist who are willing to take those statements on board practicing in general settings. But if they want to create outcome for their clients then they really should.
I’m sorry you had that experience and I’m sorry that happened to you.
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Thank you.
Here, I wasn’t even in psychosis at first. It’s just a factory-model care system…where a patient comes in, has a 15 minute interview, gets the fitting pill, moves out. I personally think they just…do not do informed consent in psychiatry…because the system’s morals are skewed. When someone is coming in with severe psychosis, you obviously do not have a big “let’s talk about risk and benefit” talk right away. 
But when someone is coming in with, say, fright over abuse…you do want to have a talk whether pills are really the way to go.
I indeed seek care now from a private practice psychologist. I believe there is a higher chance of finding a critical thinker/good/caring/involved MH worker outside of the big MH companies. Here, the system is such though, that with psychosis, you are often stuck in the big system. And can’t easily get the private practices to work with you. They are frightened, insurance often doesn’t cover, etc. But I agree…the “good ones” (in my eyes) move out.
A girl I knew wanted to become a psychiatrist. She was very caring, also because her mother had bipolar. She quit, because she couldn’t stand the arrogance and attitude of the people at the top. The senior doctors etc.
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All relevent points and I agree with everything you said, I commend you in you articulation of such. The experience to have to go through that and walk away with that kind of understanding is actually really hard. I would encourage you to continue to share your view with others in your personal life and in advocacy of people suffering from psychosis spectrum disorder and other mental illness. The more people that know that it is actually really like that the better. Live experience can be really powerful.
I really love your post to me it really was quite touching. I found it sincere, brave, honest, you know all the good things 
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