Two Books That Should Be Required Reading

Hi. i have both books & have skimmed them, but i know what’s in them. The general view is that current biomedical/mainstream psychiatry is bad & there are better ways of helping people, & in general i agree, but there are a lot of complexities to it all.

The MIA web site is touted as being a place to get open & honest discussion going on all these areas, to seek a transformation of the system, & i recently started expressing my views on there, respectfully, & was banned. They didn’t want me expressing my pov. The place has been taken over by a very staunch anti-psychiatry contingent, who deny that mental illness exists & who want to see the entire pharmacological/psychiatric Industry totally abolished - it’s as extreme/fundamentalist as what they are rallying against.

i’ve read & studied Szasz, & i fundamentally disagree with him, & can make a very good & reasoned argument as to why i think he’s wrong. i’m not as sympathetic to the staunch anti-psychiatry argument as i was. i agree there needs to be a lot of reform & a transformation of the current system - but attacking & abolishing it all, & denial that mental illness exists; i don’t think is the way to go?

MIA to my perspective is largely just all polemics - No one there is really offering any kind of viable solution to anything, nor on how everything can be realistically changed. They’re Not offering solutions about what to do with the severely mentally ill, those with long term, enduring & severe problems.

Many of the people on MIA i don’t think were that ill to begin with - & it’s all very well for a lot of them to then speak out on everything, but they’re not speaking for everyone.

i think we need a shift away from the anti/pro psychiatry polemics & a far more comprehensive psychiatry & dialogue around it all. i’m very disappointed as to what the MIA project has turned into - it’s just perpetuating the same polemical arguments that have been going on for many decades. i don’t see what they’re hoping to achieve, & i don’t really see what they will achieve?

The genuinely & most severely mentally ill are still receiving abysmal treatment & having tough lives. If anything everything is worse. If anything the anti-psychiatry position plays directly into the hands of the Right wing, as evidenced as to what happened after de-institutionalisation.

i don’t think these areas can be reduced to polemics & ‘simplistic’ black & white arguments - complex factors are involved.

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I choose ignorance.

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A lot of people who don’t read latch onto one book or two but really bios and creative history are better.

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Exactly, although i’d debate what literature is best. Unless someone is widely & well read, they’re Not going to know what’s out there.

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Yeah but older men like lister should know better

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That’s all too much for me. The book that turned my life around was If You Meet The Buddha on the Road Kill Him - a completely different book. The medicine + doses I take were determined by myself, after trying various things. I have avoided - through 50 years and 10 psychiatrists any kind of therapy. I don’t trust it. I briefly was in family therapy with a therapist I trusted to have good sense (a rarity) that had some positive results. The rest I see as playing psychology.

Here is a review of Mad in America by Treatment Advocacy Organization:

"Whitaker has nothing good to say about antipsychotic medications. He calls them “not just therapeutically neutral, but clearly harmful over the long term” and claims that the drugs themselves cause many of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Like Scientologists and other antipsychiatry groups, Whitaker exaggerates the adverse effects of antipsychotic drugs, saying, for example, that tardive dyskinesia occurs “in a high percentage of patients.” He also includes statements that are patently erroneous. For example, he claims that “even moderately high doses of haloperidol were linked to violent behavior,” when, in fact, studies have shown that haloperidol and other antipsychotics decrease violent behavior in individuals with schizophrenia. Many of Whitaker’s errors originate in his liberal footnoting of Dr. Peter Breggin, who has acknowledged having received support from Scientology, as a source.

In place of antipsychotic drugs, Whitaker extols the virtues of “love and food and understanding, not drugs.” Like many antipsychiatry advocates, Whitaker romanticizes the early eighteenth-century era of “moral treatment” in which psychiatric patients were humanely treated. At that time, claims were made for impressive cure rates, culminating in 1843, when Dr. William Awl, director of an Ohio asylum, announced that he had achieved 100 percent recoveries; thereafter he was known as “Dr. Cure-Awl.”

The failure of “moral treatment” alone as a cure for insanity was clearly established in 1876 by Dr. Pliny Earle, who showed that the prior claims had been highly exaggerated.

Whitaker highly praises the more recent version of “moral treatment,” Soteria House, started by Dr. Loren Mosher. Mosher was a protégé of Dr. Ronald Laing’s, and Mosher’s experiments, like Laing’s along these lines, have all passed into history because they failed."

http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&id=621

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And a review of Anatomy of an Epidemic:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (New York: Crown Publishers). The book has circulated widely, in large measure due to Marcia Angell’s surprisingly uncritical review of it in the New York Review of Books (Angell, 2011). In its 396 pages Whitaker got many things right, including criticism of the broad DSM diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses; the reckless prescribing of psychiatric drugs for children; and the prostitution of many psychiatric leaders for the pharmaceutical industry. Indeed, regarding the last, Whitaker may have understated the problem, based on recently released court documents detailing how the pharmaceutical industry secretly controlled the Texas Medication Algorithm Project.

When it came to schizophrenia and antipsychotic drugs, however, Whitaker got it mostly wrong. He made so many errors it is difficult to know where to begin, so I will begin where he did. In his Preface Whitaker says that his research on the book began when he encountered “two research findings that just didn’t make sense”: a 1994 schizophrenia outcome study (Hegarty et al. 1994) and the World Health Organization (WHO) studies “which had twice found that schizophrenia outcomes were much better in poor countries.”

Anatomy of an Epidemic is not without merit, however. In addition to detailing the many wrongs of American psychiatry, it reminds us what good psychiatric practice should be regarding the use of antipsychotic drugs. Use them in as low a dose as possible for no longer than necessary. Patients with a first episode of psychosis should be taken off the drugs several months after they go into remission to ascertain whether they are among the subgroup of patients who will not need maintenance medication. As patients age their medication can often be reduced and sometimes discontinued. And we need better research to be able to identify which patients need which drugs, who will develop which side effects, and who no longer needs medication. As psychiatrists we shouldn’t need to have a journalist remind us of these things; we should already be doing them.

http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/component/content/article/2085-anatomy-of-a-non-epidemic-a-review-by-dr-torrey

[quote=“SzAdmin, post:14, topic:23204”]Whitaker highly praises the more recent version of “moral treatment,” Soteria House, started by Dr. Loren Mosher. Mosher was a protégé of Dr. Ronald Laing’s, and Mosher’s experiments, like Laing’s along these lines, have all passed into history because they failed."
[/quote]

i disagree that the question of the effectiveness of comprehensive psychological/social alternatives has been properly answered.

There’s two sides to everything. Living at Soteria house was an eye-opening experience.

The difficulty i have with all this is that it is an area open to a lot of debate. We don’t know the exact aetiology of psychosis/schizophrenia & there are many different perspectives & theories - crossing biologic, psychological, social/environmental, spiritual/transpersonal & combinations of these areas. The subject simply is controversial, with no clear answers - some professionals have made/make the case that the primary aetiology in the majority of cases is psychogenic &/or social, others that it’s primarily physiological/biologic (usually depending on World view). But schizophrenia/psychosis remains a medical mystery.

There simply is evidence that depending upon individual cases of people having different outcomes depending upon a variety of factors in treatment modality. It’s not simply a case of diagnose & drug & that’s the best there is for everyone.

The WHO studies did show evidence for good prognosis in areas where there was high social cohesion & inclusion, & i don’t think that can be rationally denied. There obviously is a strong social/environmental element to psychosis/recovery - of course it can be debated how much is social? Personally i take an integral view - bio/psycho/social/spiritual & that there is no either/or - each area is interrelated & interdependent. We need, imo & far more comprehensive approach & understanding to it all.

Regardless of all the different arguments, theories & polemics - i don’t think anti/critical-psychiatry is going away.

To come back to this thread - i do understand what Szasz was saying & the anti-psychiatry argument - that psychiatry is Myth making in relation to mental illness - that it is metaphor - Diagnostic labels are categories of ranges of observed symptomatology, behaviours/experiences. But i also understand the other side of the argument as well, & i think there are a number of understandings that do, to my mind, refute Szasz.

i’m more critical of psychiatry - & in favour of a Jungian/Laingian view - that madness/mental illness exists, but to take a more comprehensive view on it all that incorporates the idea of the psyche. The facts are that people are emotionally & mentally unwell in different ways & to different degrees, & there is a physiology to it all.

Leaving aside all the polemics & semantics - the focus i feel should be how can people best be helped - the focus should be on how to best heal people & support them - Not an idealogical argument - i’m not sure that this argument really matters in the context of working towards a more humane & effective system/society in the treatment of the ‘mad’. Although some of this argument does appear to revolve around theorised aetiology - But the facts are we don’t know - no one does. Madness is as much a mystery as it ever was.

My personal view is to take an integral/holistic approach - bio/psycho/social (i’d also add the spiritual).

Very hard if not impossible to solve the mind/body dualism question, & it’s not been solved. The problem is very well elucidated here -

Within mental health i think it’s also hard to impossible to separate physiology (biology) from environment [& psychology]. Hence why i think it’s logical to take a more comprehensive view.

mister_lister seems to have disappeared, or doesn’t want to engage in the discussion, which is a shame.

Very off putting reviews
I’ll need mess for life because I’m schizophrenic!

i think there should be far more comprehensive psychosocial approaches used, especially to begin with. That said, even with a more ideal system, i still think a percentage of people will be best helped with a wise use of medication (as part of a comprehensive approach), some long term.

Some people do heal & recover long term medication free, for i think various reasons - others don’t.

Probably fewer than those non compliant who relapse and end up self medicated and stigmatised and homeless

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i may be wrong, but i think there are 2 main controversial variables involved. The severity of the underlying condition/circumstances, & the amount of genuine understanding, help & support someone receives. There may also be personal responsibility factors involved.

i went through a journey of severe dual diagnosis - & have emerged into long term sobriety & relative stability from it all. Not to say i’m without problems, there remains a whole catalogue of difficulties. i also maintain a low dose of medication, & i feel it does work on helping maintain a degree of wellness.

Same for me.


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To summarise with some random quotes/wit -

  1. Psychiatry sucks
  2. Psychiatrists sucks
  3. The whole field is a joke and a fraud.
  4. No specific, individual, objective test proves mental illness is for real.
  5. 27,198 anecdotal tidbits confirming the above

Mental illness – it don’t exist, babe. Call the press. Call your MP. Call the prime minister. Mental illness ain’t. It is all B.S. created by filthy perverts looking to get rich quick. What do you say, bro? Good news ain’t it? Holy mackerel. We done it! It is those Damn drugs that are killing those suckers with fake symptoms.
Have a drink. Destroy some more neurons. Hallelujah! Glory!

Plop plop fizz fizz. Classic hilarity.

‘“All pharmaceutical drugs work by disrupting normal brain function.” It
is not possible to disrupt brain function. The brain never malfunctions.
It cannot. All anti-psychs agree on that.’

Don’t forget that the mind also doesn’t exist or can’t be sick - Szasz worked out the Age old problem of Dualism with that one, Genius that he was.

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You are welcome to your opinion - but I think you’d do well to look at the facts. Here are the results from a recent poll in this discussion group:

Source:

And with that - I think this topic is closed.

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