An intro to navigating this site: BEYOND MEDS — ALTERNATIVES TO PSYCHIATRY — A RESOURCE
BEYOND MEDS — ALTERNATIVES TO PSYCHIATRY — A RESOURCE
This blog is no longer being updated on a daily basis and is being left online as a resource.
Update – New Tab — Oct 16, 2010 – Online support and info for psychiatric drug withdrawal
Update – New tab – October 14, 2010 – a new page with links to articles about the isolation and sense of abandonment many people deal with when sick with protracted withdrawal illness.
October 1, 2010 NEW TAB – GUEST WRITERS — Authors from the life span of the blog who shared their work and insights with the readers at Beyond Meds.
Sept 21 — New Tab – Links to farewell posts from other bloggers
Please see tabs at top of page for additional access to important archives. I will try to make more archives more accessible over time through this tab system. I hope to perhaps add a tab with all the wonderful guest writers with alternative messages, for example. Please look for updates to the system.
This blog is, in part, a documentation of my journey off psychiatric medications as well as an introduction to alternative forms of care for mental health disorders regardless of whether one is on medications, off medications, or coming off medications.
This blog also serves as a source of critical information about psychopharmaceuticals.
This blog is not only for people with bipolar disorder as the URL seems to suggest to some. As I say in my “Undiagnosing Myself” post I do not believe that the diagnosis of bipolar is terribly significant and I chose the URL and original title of the blog to attract people who may have experiences like mine and believe themselves to be bipolar.
This blog may be appropriate for anyone with any psychiatric diagnosis. All diagnosis can potentially respond to natural treatments. It’s possible for anyone to consider life without medication. This blog is a contemplation about healing ourselves through means other than medication whether you’re on medications or not. And I might add whether you choose to stay on them or not.
Gianna’s interview on Madness Radio
The first three years of this blog included my own personal withdrawal story off of 6 medications. I finally freed myself from them on February 9, 2010 after 6 years of withdrawal.
Along with documentation of my experience this blog covers the journeys to drug freedom of many other people as well as information and resources about alternatives to standard psychiatric care. It also covers the news about drugs that allow for consideration of other options. Often drugs are most useful in crisis, but not for long-term care. Once one is aware of options one has a real choice. I didn’t have such information to make a choice when I entered the mental health system. It’s my hope that I can help people see that there are choices and alternatives.
This site is in no way intended to be someone’s sole source of information for withdrawing from psych meds or for taking care of oneself with alternative means. I speak only from my own experience and am not offering advice that should be taken without professional help. That being said there is lots of information here that one could take to said professional. It is an unfortunate reality that most doctors know next to nothing about alternative treatments for psychiatric distress. I’ve had to educate my psychiatrist along the way and am grateful for his trust and respect.
I’ve withdrawn from:
- 84 mg of Concerta
- 50 mg of Seroquel
- 200 mg of Zoloft
- 400 mg of Lamictal
- 11 mg of Risperdal
- 3 mg of Klonopin
On Sept 4, 2o1o I stopped updating the blog. I am now in the process of healing from the insult of multiple neurotoxins for more than 2 decades.
***The information provided on this site is educational and not intended to replace any treatment prescribed by a licensed physician.
This blog also deals in general with socio/political and spiritual issues as they pertain to mental health and human rights issues surrounding psychiatry. For additional collections of such themed posts look at the tabs on the top of the page.
Recovery Stories: have been moved to their own page. Please view these to get a sense of the large variation of methods people use to get well.
This intro page is heavy on diet and nutrition, but meditation and yoga, and all sorts of other therapies and alternatives may be equally and sometimes more important given the needs of any particular individual. Everyone’s journey to wellness includes different combinations of such practices. No two of us are the same.
Please start here with this link to an update and warning
For an introduction to this site and, more specifically, for multiple resources for getting support and information about withdrawal please visit the following posts:
General background:
- Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal for Beginners: more on psychiatric drug withdrawal here.
- Lamictal Withdrawal and general information about the drug--a collection of posts on Lamictal
- BENZOS — a page dedicated to information on benzodiazepines — as a class of drugs we know more about benzo withdrawal than any other psychoactive drugs.
- Water Titration for slow and controlled withdrawal
- Nutrition for beginners here and here.
- Alternative Medicine — a commentary
- Food Allergies and elimination diet
- Gluten and mental health
- Supplements (just to get some ideas–further research should be done for your own individual situation)
- Amino Acids and mental health
- Probiotics and Mental Health
- Healing the gut (often first step to healing the mind)—and how antidepressants are certainly not the answer
- Drug withdrawal and emotional recovery By John Breeding — How to cope and deal with the emotional aspects of withdrawal. IMPORTANT way to think about the process.
- Symptoms and Acceptance
- Clinical Trials vs. Anecdotal Evidence
- Neurofeedback
- Meditation and it’s role in my healing
- 15-year Follow-up Schizophrenia Study: No Drugs = Better chance at Recovery—(this is about antipsychotics—it can be applied to any psychiatric diagnosis—the neuroleptics weaken us)
- Coming off Medications by Guy Holmes and Marese Hudson
- SSRI and Benzo withdrawal symptoms lists
- Making sense of coming off psychiatric drugs. Put out by the UK Charity MIND—not the be all end all on withdrawal but another good resource.
- Taking it slow when need be
- Email support lists
- Anatomy of an Epidemic: Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America By Robert Whitaker (this is an article, not his book of the same name…the book is below)
- Food for thought for anyone in the consumer movement
Recommended Books: (by no means is this an exhaustive list)
- Your Drug May Be Your Problem: how and why to stop taking psychiatric medications By Peter Breggin
- Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry — Peter Stastny and Peter Lehmann, editors (a collection of alternatives written by survivors of psychiatry)
- Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide to Informed Consent By Grace Jackson (for my own review and an excerpt from the introduction see this post)
- Myth of the Chemical Cure – Joanne Moncrieff
- Soteria By Loren Mosher (For the website describing the study and implementation of this wonderful method of healing see here)
- Spiritual Emergency by Stan and Christina Grof
- Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the mentally ill Robert Whitaker
- Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America — by Robert Whitaker NEW – MUST READ and be sure to visit the tab with much more of Whitaker’s work
- Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal Guide by Icarus Project and the Freedom Center (available free on the web)—a good place to start and bolster your research.
- Heather Ashton Manual on Getting off of Benzodiazepines (available free on the web)
Books on Diet and Nutrition and Natural Healing: (they all are applicable to just about any mental health problem)
- Depression Free Naturally: 7 weeks to Eliminating Anxiety, Despair, Fatigue, and Anger from Your Life By Joan Larson
- Natural Healing for Bipolar Disorder: A Compendium of Nutritional Approaches — Eva Edilman and Abram Hoffer
- Natural Healing for Schizophrenia And Other Common Mental Disorders –Eva Edilman
- The Natural Medicine Guide to Bipolar Disorder By Stephanie Marohn
- The Natural Medicine Guide to Depression — By Stephanie Marohn
- The Brain Chemistry Diet By Michael Lesser MD
- Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression — By James Gordon
Online support for psychiatric drug withdrawal
This is a new tab at the top of the page. I decided to make it a post too so that it would be more thoroughly indexed by google. I hope this information may be useful to many people. I’m sorry if you were notified more than once because of my decision to post it here after the fact.
Online support for psychiatric drug withdrawal
Support is vitally important in the process of withdrawal. Often one of the best places for information and support is online as there are rarely people in our lives who truly understand what we are undertaking. It’s important to have people supporting you at home too and ultimately better if you can manage that. The best case scenario is to have both, along with professionals that also support you. I never found professionals who really knew what to do, but I did find wonderful people who cooperated with me and learned with me about the whole process. That is often the best one can do. It’s critical that the professionals you work with are willing to listen to your particular experience.
In preparing to withdraw diet and nutrition is very important. A good multi-vitamin, minerals, magnesium, vitamin C and fish oil is a good place to start. Other supplements may be helpful as well and often finding what you need is a research project–if one is lucky they may find a good alternative health care provider, but that is often hard to find. I’ve found most of my care online with very careful research.
Withdrawal info here. and Nutrition info here–this is just to start thinking…individual needs vary and my diet too has varied over the course of this journey.
Some online support groups are listed here:
- Alt Therapies for Bipolar
- Alternative to Meds (Safe Harbor)
- BenzoWithdrawal.com
- BenzoBuddies.org
- BenzozIsland
- Med Free or Working on It
- Paxil Progress (SSRI withdrawal forum)
- Recovery Road
Many support groups are dogmatically opposed to all supplementation. This is probably because once in withdrawal many people react to and develop sensitivities to many things, including foods and natural things. What I’ve observed is that if one starts a carefully thought out program of supplementation BEFORE they get sick from withdrawal it goes a long way in supporting good health. In fact, if one is able the best thing to do is clean up diet and nutrition before one starts withdrawing. In these cases it seems less reactivity to supplements, food etc happens.
If you’ve already begun to withdraw it’s important to be VERY careful when adding supplements as people can certainly react to all sorts of things. Getting professional help or help from others who have done this is really quite necessary if you’ve not used supplements before. Caution is always warranted. The flip side of this is there are people who recommend supplements for mental health concerns that can be very risky especially during withdrawal. It’s very common for alternative doctors to do this prescribing sometimes. One must learn adequate discrimination as most of these doctors have never seen someone in acute withdrawal.
I’ve found that all support groups and forums have their own particular culture and dogma. Please use your own best judgment. The most important thing to remember is that you are an individual and withdrawal manifests differently for everyone.
There are many more online groups and boards if you do a google search. There are also lots of videos on youtube that have been made by people coping with withdrawal.
It’s best to join several groups and learn all you can from as many sources as possible since the dogma in each group sometimes precludes good sense and you may find what you need elsewhere. This is especially important if you are on multiple drugs as groups that specialize with one class of drug are generally quite unknowledgeable about the other classes.
The single drug boards have a strength in that they have a very large collective knowledge. (Benzo and SSRI boards) Boards that deal with all drugs often have much less collective knowledge about safe withdrawal, so it’s actually quite helpful to join the single drug boards even if you’re on multiple meds. Most of the best withdrawal tips are applicable to all the psych drugs.
Also be aware that the benzo and/or SSRI boards in general know very little about the particular risks and dangers of other drugs one may be on along with the drug that group concentrates on and in fact often give very bad information regarding other drugs and their use. This is a generalization but it pays to be aware of a lack of knowledge and experience by people who sometimes act as if they know more than they do. Multiple drug situations get extremely complicated and most benzo folks think it’s benzos are always at fault when speaking about withdrawal issues when it may or may not be true in any individual situation.
One benzo board made it explicit to me that I was NOT ALLOWED to talk about other drugs at all after I gave some information to someone who had started a thread about antidepressants. The information I gave was limited to responding to a direct inquiry about a particular documented risk involved in taking antidepressants. This silence about another class of drugs in a benzo forum is a dangerous precedent to set and so if you have any other drugs involved in your taper I would recommend going somewhere you can freely talk about all of them.
The same thing happens on antidepressant withdrawal boards where people are routinely on benzos and no one realizes how dangerous the benzos are. Just be aware all the psychotropics have serious issues as well as withdrawal problems. That some people sometimes choose to take other drugs to mitigate withdrawal from a drug is fine…it is their right to do so, but if information is withheld about the risks involved in doing so how is the board different than a psychiatrist saying everything will be fine while they feed us benzos.
As always informed choice is what is missing. Once the information is available people should have the right to make whatever decision is right for them.
And for my own brief description on what I’ve learned about withdrawal and what I did for the most part see here.
End of an era (for me) this is Beyond Meds last post
Thank you to all my readers for being part of this transformative journey with me. It’s time for me to move on and do other things.
This blog, depending on which ranking system you look at, is between number 1 and number 5 or so of mental health blogs. I feel good about leaving and that the work has been a success.
The blog will remain online as a resource. I will come and do a post that helps orient new comers to the blog in general and to the navigation of the archives sometime in the not too distant future.
For now simply go to the tabs above for some navigation. I will try to improve access to more parts of the blog as I have time.
A flower from our yard -- HUGE! That is my finger for scale
Goodbye! Cheers and peace to all.
Life is a monastery — regardless of marital status
This is an article that was first published in Buddhadharma. I got this from Utne Reader, who reprinted it.
I saw the author’s experience in the monastery as life. Life is just like his monastery. See if you see what I mean.
This is the opening several paragraphs below:
The Angry Monk
A lot of pissed-off people wind up at our monastery. This place has a tractor beam like the Death Star in Star Wars that pulls in everyone within a thousand-mile radius with four-letter words on the tips of their tongues. Her marriage tanked, he’s got an itch in his brain he just can’t scratch, she’s 45 and smells of cabbage and lives in a small studio apartment and nobody ever calls her back. They all wind up here, sold on the promise that Buddhism can alleviate suffering.
I said “they” all wind up here, but I guess I mean “we.” I recently had one of those moments when, upon the much-anticipated departure of an enemy who, as a Buddhist, I could never quite admit was an enemy, I found myself peering around the zendo and thinking, “Wow, there are no assholes living here anymore.” Whereupon came a sinking feeling: “Wait a minute, there’s always at least one. So if I’m looking around the zendo and I can’t find him—guess who the asshole is!”
Zen practice is good for angry people. The form is tight. It squeezes that deep red heart-pulp, pushing up emotions from way down inside you. A lot of stuff comes up when you do this practice. Zen gets your juices flowing. And with these juices come seeds—the seeds of your behavior, your character, your anger, all flushed out into the open for you to see.
In Zen we learn that human consciousness is an eminently natural operation. You plant a seed, it grows. Similarly, when something happens to you on the outside, in “the world,” the seeds of this experience take root within you, becoming sensations, thoughts, memories—your inner life. Conversely, when something arises within you, some inner experience, a notion, emotion, or dream, then the seeds of this inner event are disseminated on the outside, in the world, through your words and actions. Buddhists call this codependent origination: all things arise together in a mutually interconnected and interpenetrating web of being. “To see the world in a grain of sand,” William Blake wrote. Or as that great metaphysician Tom “Jerry Maguire” Cruise put it: “You complete me.”
Sounds romantic. But what if the seeds at the root of your behavior are the seeds of hate and anger? read the rest
In memory of my brother…
I wrote this letter and mailed it to my brother about 6 months before he died. Today is the three year anniversary of his death. I am sharing this in his memory. I actually had told him all of this at one time or another while he was alive but before he died it got increasingly difficult for him to communicate by phone so I reiterated some of the things that were in my heart for him.
I think of my brother pretty much all the time. He got sick and died in the same time I was withdrawing from drugs and so towards the end off his life I was already quite sick. In fact the last time I visited him we were both needing to take multiple breaks to sit down if we went out.
Ironically and sadly, he was my only sibling who asked, every time we had contact how my withdrawal was going. Now it’s been two years since my other two siblings have even called me on the phone let alone asked me how I am. So the devastation of losing him was all the greater. He’s my only sibling who ever took my life seriously. I don’t really feel like I have siblings left.
He is still in my heart. Today and always.
My dear (brother),
I want to take this opportunity to tell you what you’ve meant to me all my life and how much I love you. I know you are suffering now and don’t know how to talk to you on the phone. I hope I will be able to spend some quiet contemplative time with you soon.
You mean so much to me and the phone has been a completely inadequate piece of technology for sharing that with you. And so now I write this letter.
You have always been the brother, the family member that “got” me. You wrote me letters when I was a teenager in the midst of typical teenage angst and you gave me hope for my future. I was in the dysfunction that was our family at the time as well as in our hometown, another stifling dark place for me. You assured me that I was among a small percentage of sensitive people in the world and that when I got to university I would find my element. I believed you and I held on to that as a lifeline. You gave me the hope I needed to get through the last couple of years of difficulty at home. I did indeed find like-minded souls in college and you became my knight in shining armor. I love you so much.
We continued our correspondence once I was in college while you lived abroad. I know you worried about me once I got involved in searching my psyche with drugs and got hospitalized etc. But you never condescended to me and instead you shared your admiration of me. You admired what you said was my sense of adventure and you said I was courageous. You boosted my self-confidence when I felt everyone else was judging me and making me wrong for making the mistakes of youth. You once said you saw optimism in me. In fact you said that I was the most optimistic person you knew. That I never gave up. That was the first time I recognized some of my strengths. You trusted something inside me. You saw my potential and you loved me without judgment. That allowed me to trust myself more and in turn also judge myself less. You always had a healing effect on me.
So you see, you planted seeds in me. Seeds that have served me my whole life and will continue to serve me. You saw in me what no one else did and you helped me see it too.
I love you. I don’t know what will happen in the future but I needed to tell you this. You have been one of the most important people in my life, even in the many years we did not have as much contact because of your living in another country you continued to inspire me. It’s been so nice to be able to see you more and talk to you in the last few years. I wish it wasn’t because you’ve been sick. I’m so sorry that that is what brought it about. But I’ve been grateful for the time we’ve spent together in the last few years and hope we have more time to spend together soon.
All my love to you (brother), all of it now, wishing you healing in body, mind and spirit.
Peace and love to you,
Gianna
Personal update by way of an email I sent out to the “Lamictal crew” — musings on persistent withdrawal symptoms
This is an email I wrote to people who had commented on this blog a couple of years ago on posts I wrote about my Lamictal withdrawal. I was seeking information. I’m sharing it here just as an update of sorts to the part of this blog which is my withdrawal journal. I still have many other symptoms that are problematic but I was trying to find out more about this particular one which is described in the email below:
Hi all,
I’m writing to you all seeking any information that might shed light on my current situation.I am still very ill as a result of post withdrawal from 6 meds. I’ve been off drugs for 6 1/2 months. One of those meds I came off of, as you all know, was Lamictal.
I get most of my anectdotal info about long-term withdrawal syndromes from benzo groups and SSRI groups as there is very little organized information among other psychotropic drug users who have withdrawn. The benzo and SSRI groups have been established a long time and there is quite a lot of solid information based on many years and many thousands of people having withdrawn.
Most of my symptoms are in keeping with others who have used and withdrawn from benzos. Even if all my issues are not caused by benzos I’ve discovered that there is much crossover of symptoms from the withdrawal of any and all of the psychotropics.
My question is about a long-term troubling “symptom” that started when I was withdrawing from Lamictal and has never remitted. I finished my Lamictal withdrawal almost 2 years ago.
The reason I come to you all is because I’ve not encountered anyone in the benzo groups who suffer from this symptom and since it can be comforting to find others who have had debilitating symptoms that have resolved in time I am asking about this. Also it helps to know if people who have experienced similar issues have learned of effective ways to cope.
The symptom I speak of is what I’ve often referred to as my “shot up with heroin” feeling. I often feel as though I’ve been shot up with a hefty dose of heroin and I pretty much am in a state that feels extremely sedated to the point of nodding out…it’s serious and heavy and there is nothing pleasant about it so in that regard it’s unlike a heroin high. I can’t get out of bed when these feelings hit and while I am not longer 100% bedbound this phenomena is seriously setting me back…I sometimes call them “spells” too…it’s overwhelming and crippling and is the largest reason I’m still often tied to my bed.
So they started when I began my withdrawal from Lamictal…maybe 3 years ago…and I’ve been off Lamictal for 2 years.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? If so did you learn of ways to cope or lessen the problem? Right now I’m at the mercy of this…I just have to wait until it passes…sometimes it’s worse than others.
This email is going to folks who commented on my blog about Lamictal. I’ve also included a couple of bloggers who have had access to lots of anecdotes as well as their own experience.
thanks for any info you can share. I may make this into a post on the blog…please let me know if you are okay with my sharing your comments and if so let me know how you would like to be cited (or not – anonymity is fine)
thanks very much.
Gianna
The responses I got didn’t really provide new information for the most part. The fact that some people experience this when they come off Lamictal was clear. Unfortunately the description is also vague enough that perhaps people don’t understand how severe it is for me. I slur my words at times and literally cannot stand because I feel so drugged and sedated. Everyone in any sort of drug withdrawal experiences fatigue and exhaustion which some people seem to think I’m talking about.
So there are questions as to how to recognize whether people are experiencing something similar or not. Ultimately it’s clear, too that this is not a symptom everyone experiences by any means.
One person’s doctor labeled her experience “borderline narcolepsy” which I imagine doesn’t really mean anything at all. I suspect it’s just a clinical sounding term for my more colloquial “feeling shot up with heroin.” Read more…
Over-medicating kids in the New York Times
There is a feature article and a video today in the New York Times.
Hope the kid who is featured gets off the amphetamines too. He’s had a rough time of it, his short little life.
David Bransford MD, has a critical post on his blog about the phenomena too, inspired by the above pieces, from his perspective as a practicing psychiatrist.
And check out the Risperdal building blocks (legos) on this blog that also features the NYT article. Yes, toys with “Risperdal,” the potent antipsychotic drug, printed across the length of them!
I found another picture of the legos on google images. Here they are called Risperdallego…lovely. For the full effect see the kid playing with them at the above link which I just put here again now too.
Wanted to call attention to the above links as I know it’s a topic of which many like to stay apprised.
Happy September
Cover by Pomplamoose:
Got an email from Bruce E. Levine alerting me to his new article/book review in ZMagazine. It ends with a few paragraphs on how the mainstream media is mostly ignoring Robert Whitaker’s critical and important work on psychiatry and psychopharmaceuticals.
Activism with each and everyone one of us participating is crucial to alert the public to the potentially very serious impact of these drugs on people’s live. In many of our lives the potential has already been visited in ugly fashion. We need to stop this very dangerous epidemic.
I’ve excerpted that part below:
Mainstream reviews of Anatomy of an Epidemic have been, with a few exceptions, conspicuously absent and Whitaker has been granted few mainstream media interviews. Moreover, at least one U.S. government agency has attempted to silence him, but people are fighting back and, in at least one case, winning.
The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), since 1985, has provided a grant to fund the Alternatives Conference, which brings together several hundred mental health consumers from throughout the United States. Alternatives Conference organizers in 2010 confirmed an invitation with Robert Whitaker as the keynote speaker. However, on July 15, 2010, organizers reported that Whitaker’s confirmation was retracted, saying they had received objections from U.S. government higher-ups.
The good news is that a grass-roots protest resulted in SAMHSA reversing its retraction and Whitaker was reinstated as the keynote speaker at the Alternatives 2010 Conference scheduled for September 29 through October 3 in Anaheim, California. The effective activism was spearheaded by MindFreedom, an organization composed of “psychiatric survivors” committed to reforming mental health treatment by providing Americans with truly informed choice and a variety of treatment options. Neither MindFreedom nor Whitaker are anti-drug. Both simply want Americans to be aware of the extensive body of research telling us that long-term psychiatric drug use has been, for many of its recipients, a bad idea. In the solutions section of Anatomy of an Epidemic, Whitaker describes how doctors in northern Finland use antipsychotic drugs sparingly and in an extremely selective, cautious manner when treating first-episode psychotic patients. Also, a variety of alternative therapies are provided and treatment decisions are made jointly with patients and their families. The results? “The long-term outcomes are,” Whitaker notes, “by far, the best in the Western World.”
The battle is clear. Will Anatomy of an Epidemic, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, alert the nation to a tragedy created by an industry’s arrogant use of chemicals? Or will those who are profiting from the status quo be able to silence Whitaker and bury his book? read the whole review
For more of Robert Whitaker’s work go here.
A mother’s perspective on psychosis in her son
Rossa Forbes again writes amazing brilliant observations in the post in response to the CNN piece on childhood bipolar. Simple, profound and simply missed by almost everyone. This is why I love her work. As a mother of a child who was labeled with a psychiatric illness she is able to say with plenty of self-respect what others cannot say. Without self-blame she is able to take appropriate amounts of responsibility while also encouraging her son to do the same. Her whole blog is worth reading by anyone but especially parents who find themselves in the mental health system with their children regardless of diagnosis.
From today’s post:
Being on the person’s side, seeing life from someone else’s point of view, is huge in healing. Most parents are too busy settling disputes amongst siblings to really focus on the child’s point of view.
When we landed in the mental health system, after a while I began to wonder who was really on Chris’s side. It took me a while, but I finally realized that Chris’s perceptions were real, not something that should be dismissed as lunatic ravings. Okay, psychosis is an unusual way to express yourself, but for some people, it is the only way until they master a way of not retreating into psychosis. The doctors claimed they were on Chris’s side, but then they referred to him as a patient, they spoke of his delusions, they gave him drugs to sedate him. They encouraged a view of a limited future.
Parents can easily fall into the same trap and will take the side of the doctor, which is a negative and mechanical view of the individual. Ian and I cajoled Chris into taking his meds because the doctors said it was essential. We looked at Chris as if he was the crazy one. We were not on his side. We confused empathy with pity. read the rest
Today on twitter was this tweet (via @damici2):
The near enemy of compassion is pity, which keeps one at a distance and does not urge one to help.
I discovered for the second time that Tart Cherry extract really helps the pain associated with withdrawal syndrome. This is pain that often gets mistook to be fibromyalgia when in fact it’s caused by the psychiatric drugs and the withdrawal from them. It’s possible though that this may help those with fibro too as it’s conceivably helpful for pain in general as an anti inflammatory. This is an anecdote but it’s backed with some clinical studies.
I started taking it a while ago more as a way to ingest natural melatonin as I don’t do well with the synthesized supplements. I’ve tried both the cherry juice concentrate and the extract in pills or capsules. The juice was simply too sweet. The capsules have been my preference.
I discontinued them a while back as I developed an allergy to raspberries and so cut out most high salicylate foods as a precaution. Pain that had greatly diminished returned. I thought it was interesting but being that many salicylate foods are also anti-inflammatory I didn’t think much about it and slowly added back by salicylate foods including the tart cherry. My pain again remitted, though I didn’t know what a role the tart cherry was playing until I ran out of it for a week and again, pain I’d not had in months returned. I’m a convert now. I will take my tart cherry until my body has had much more time to recover.
My pain includes muscle pain/soreness and rigidity and spasms. I also sometimes have spinal pain and sometimes the pain feels deep in my bones.
Tart cherry is high in antioxidants and since it’s also got a wee bit of melatonin in it so it can help calm and sleep as well…
As I said I prefer the capsules because they are not sweet — when I tried the juice concentrate the sugar triggered anxiety several different times and indeed in general I do not touch sugar. Natural fruit sugars when concentrated can still be problematic for those of us sensitive to sugar so be aware of that in general.
As a side note I add lots of anti inflammatory foods and spices to my diet as well and it’s possible they all work together…but I sure noticed not taking the tart cherry at all…and I didn’t expect it either time actually.
Anti inflammatory foods and diet can potentially help any and all pain (nothing is a cure-all) and neither has my heavy anti inflammatory diet been a cure-all for me but it’s certainly taken a big chunk out of pain. I went from not tolerating being even lightly touched by another human being to being able to be hugged again. I’m still achy most days but it’s a far cry from the pain I experience at times.
There are also clinical trials reported by medical sites that have looked at this…
Here is one study…this is in “normal” people with “normal” pain – but the fact is it works like a NSAID…again…suggesting it can ease any pain without the potential problems of pharmaceutical NSAIDs.
Perhaps this will help someone else.
By Robert Whitaker printed here with permission by the author.
Check out the story that appeared on August 30 on CNN.com titled “Growing Up Bipolar,” and the one on August 31 in the New York Times’s science section, titled “Lasting Pleasures, Robbed by Drug Abuse.” Both reveal a lot about the selective story-telling that forms our societal beliefs about mental disorders and psychotropic drugs.
The CNN story tells of how psychiatrists are getting better about diagnosing bipolar disorder in children, and how, once it is properly diagnosed, medications can be such a big help. But if you read the article closely, you’ll see that both of the children in this story were treated iitially with an antidepressant, which led to a manic episode in one child and to a further deterioration in behavior in the second child, and it was then they were diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Before psychiatry began prescribing stimulants and antidepressants to children, juvenile bipolar illness was unknown. Researchers regularly concluded that bipolar disorder (or manic depressive illness, as it was called in the past,) simply didn’t occur in prepubertal children. But then psychiatry began prescribing those drugs to children and youth, and the juvenile bipolar boom followed. Indeed, when researchers have surveyed juvenile bipolar patients, they have found that the overwhelming majority had been treated with a stimulant or an antidepressant prior to their being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In other words, the CNN story should perhaps have been titled: “Creating the Bipolar Child: The Risks of Prescribing Antidepressants to Youth.”
In the New York Times article, Weill Cornell Medical College psychiatrist Richard Friedman tells of how illicit drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine activate the brain’s reward system by releasing dopamine. However, he notes, the brain then tries to compensate for the drug’s presence, and it does by becoming less sensitive to dopamine release. The brain may end up with a “less responsive reward circuit,” which never fully repairs itself even after the drug use stops, he writes. The result is that the person may then be condemned to “endure a dulled life.”
All of that may be true. But here is what is missing from this article. Ritalin and the other stimulants used to treat ADHD in children also activate the “dopamine system.” Ritalin, in fact, does it in much the same manner that cocaine does, and with equal potency. The difference is that Ritalin is not cleared from the body as quickly as cocaine, and thus a dose of Ritalin has longer-acting effects than cocaine. In response, the stimulant-using brain undergoes changes that make it less sensitive to dopamine release—it is trying to compensate for the drug’s presence. And so now the obvious question. If this process, in those who use cocaine or other illicit drugs, may lead to a “less responsive reward circuit,” which never fully repairs itself even after the drug use stops, isn’t there a similar risk with putting children on Ritalin or other stimulants? Is this treatment that may then lead children to “endure a dulled life” as adults?
It seems like a question that psychiatry—based on this article by Richard Friedman in the New York Times—should ask.
For more on this see Whitaker’s post today on Psychology Today: The Question that Dare Not Be Asked
Befriending ourselves…not so easy
Pema Chödrön reveals the time-tested Buddhist antidote to suffering—and shows how to apply it in your own life. The simple and elegant meditation practice known as tonglen, she teaches, is the perfect medicine for “ordinary people like ourselves.” Through tonglen, we can use life’s difficulties as a way to befriend ourselves, accept the past we have rejected, and widen our circle of compassion.
Excerpted from the DVD Good Medicine.
Hat tip Elephant Journal
Robert Whitaker “Anatomy Of An Epidemic” At Powells Aug 2010 – Video + Audio
Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, spoke in Portland Oregon August 19 2010, at events sponsored by Portland Hearing Voices and co-sponsored by the Mental Health Association of Portland, Empowerment Initiatives, and the National Association of Social Workers – Oregon Mental Health Network.
More than 250 people attended the standing-room only talk at Powell’s Books; some 65 people were at the afternoon seminar “Ethical Medication Policy In Clinical Settings,” and more than 30 at the morning forum for people with mental health diagnosis, “Medications and the Recovery Movement.” Will Hall introduced Whitaker at Powells and spoke at the other events,and Myriam Rahman, therapist and Portland Hearing Voices trainer, as well as recovery movement leaders Laura Van Tosh and Mike Hlebechuk, were also speakers.
Listen to the audio recording of Whitaker and Will Hall at Powell’s here:
Listen to the audio of Whitaker, Will Hall, and Myriam Rahman at the MedicationEthics seminar here:
You can watch the video of Whitaker’s talk at Powell’s Books here:
Another brief twitter piece of prose
I have put the three tweets this was into one brief paragraph:
Let’s all stop pretending we know…The most offensive quality of someone who purports to “know” is assuming their personal experience can be generalized to all people. That is the biggest lie the ego tells…we do not know the secrets of others and we are only very fortunate to perhaps know our own.
The aftermath: from windows to open door
An excerpt from Benzo-Wise: A recovery companion – by Baylissa Frederick who operates the website Recovery Road that has many resources for successful withdrawal and recovery from benzos. Baylissa has been fully recovered since this excerpt was written. She is one of my greatest inspirations and has written other inspiring and healing posts on this blog too.
Editors note: for those of you who are not familiar with the terminology used in benzo withdrawal groups I’m putting this little glossary here as an intro.
Windows are periods of relative well-being after having been very sick. For some people they are “normal” periods, for others who are struck harder by the withdrawal syndrome they are simply periods of some improvement. Windows often come and go throughout the tapering and the post withdrawal period both.
Waves are markedly worse times and they also come and go, more often during the recovery process.
An open door of course is the resolution of the healing process and that is Baylissa’s own word to celebrate her healing.
The Aftermath
February 10, 2008
From Windows to Open Door
“I am writing this for anyone who is still trying to cope with the brain fog, depersonalisation, derealisation and other psychological and physical symptoms. I am thankful for my current window of clarity which I think has become my open door to recovery. It has now been ten weeks. The continuous lucidity and clarity of thought are still slightly unfamiliar. It feels pleasantly strange after having spent the last ten years in a blurred reality. My recovery still makes me feel emotional and extremely pleased. I feel as if I have been given a second chance at life.
Not very long ago, I was having one of my worst withdrawal waves. Despite affirming and remaining positive, there was a tiny part of me that wondered whether I should just accept that I may either have permanent brain damage or, that I may have a few more years to wait for my recovery. A little voice tried to reason that maybe it was part of my reality, a path I needed to take, and if I affirmed otherwise, it was my ego getting in the way. I resisted those fears and continued affirming my healing and speaking positively to myself. A bigger voice inside responded saying, “Be patient; you will make your own happy ending.”
I started challenging myself to do a lot of the activities I had postponed for when I got better – anything that I was capable of doing. I stopped giving attention to the symptoms, acting, even if in mind only, as if I had no symptoms. This was difficult with the dizziness and hearing problems but there was a part of me that just would not give in to that other voice telling me withdrawal has gone on for much too long and it must be something more.
If any of this resonates with you, I cannot tell you with any more conviction that your healing is taking place, now, as you read this. When a symptom seems unrelenting and you have done everything possible and nothing seems to be working, trust that your brain is in the process of readjusting to being functional without the drug. Then imagine what you will be like (go into as much detail as possible and feel it as well) without the foggy brain or whatever your symptoms are. See yourself doing all the things you cannot yet do but will be able to when the symptoms go.
When I read what I had written in November and think of how I feel now, I cannot help but write to remind you that every day in every way your body is recovering. Your healing has already taken place.”
A popular tweet (or two)
This tweet I came up with was very popular the other day…got retweeted a whole bunch, so I’ll share:
Remember we never know what another person has lived. Ever. Even if they are our neighbor/best friend/sibling.
And here is another that I also liked:
Some people are inflexible and imagine insults when there are none…I’m some people sometime…
Deadly cocktail being given to soldiers: Paxil, Seroquel, Klonopin — all drugs I was on, it’s routine in psychiatry
From an email sent to me from Vince Boehm, he makes the below comments from having communicated with the family of Andrew White, the soldier the below article is about:
Stan and Shirley White lost two sons to war. Robert White, a staff sergeant, was killed in Afghanistan in 2005, when his Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. But the death of Robert’s younger brother Andrew, who survived Iraq only to succumb to a different battle, is in some ways “harder to accept” says his father.
Struggling with PTSD compounded by grief over the death of his brother, Andrew sought help from VA doctors. Their first line of defense was to prescribe him 20 mg. of Paxil, 4 mg of Klonopin and 50 mg of Seroquel. These medications helped at first, but later proved ineffective. Instead of changing the course of treatment, the doctors responded by continually increasing his dosage until the Seroquel alone reached a whopping 1600 mg per day. Within weeks of Andrew’s death, three more young West Virginia veterans died while being treated for PTSD with the same drugs, prompting Stan and Shirley White to begin a mission to find out what the deaths have in common.
Questions loom over drug for sleepless vets – Associated Press UPDATE (I was away. This is the original source. I had used a military paper that has since taken the report down…I’m sorry for the delay in fixing it)
WASHINGTON — Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-psychotic called Seroquel.
Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, helping to make Seroquel one of the Veterans Affairs Department’s top drug expenditures and the No. 5 best-selling drug in the nation.
Several soldiers and veterans have died while taking the pills, raising concerns among some military families that the government is not being up front about the drug’s risks. They want Congress to investigate. read the rest
It should be noted that Seroquel only remains sedating at low doses, but most shrinks don’t know that and will keep raising the dose ending up with a paradox effect that they don’t recognize. Ultimately the drug can become more agitating than calming so it’s no wonder sleep eludes these soldiers.
What’s happening to our soldiers is highlighting the routine treatment other people in the mental health system are subjected to always. I was on high doses of all three of these drugs and then some. It’s not unique to soldiers. I’m sorry their tragedy is what it takes to highlight these gross abuses.
Scary vintage benzo ads…
and
For the reality which is benzodiazepines should you be at all influenced by the ads see here. They aren’t all happy and mystically transforming. Not in a good way. No.
This is the propaganda campaign that began our journey into better living through chemistry.
Mother’s little helpers too, were benzodiazepines.
By Robert Whitaker (printed with his permission, he retains copyright)
The story of how the STAR*D results were misreported has been coming together for some time now, step by step, and a paper recently published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, along with a review of that paper published by Medscape Medical News on August 24, leads to an inescapable conclusion: This is a story of a scientific scandal, one that the public needs to know about.
The STAR*D trial, which was funded by the NIMH at a cost of $35 million and took six years to conduct, was touted as as the “largest antidepressant effectiveness trial ever conducted.” As it was designed to study treatment strategies for helping people recover and then stay well, with a one-year followup, it would produce results, the investigators announced at the start of the trial, that would have “substantial public health and scientific significance.” As the public well knows now, pharmaceutical funding of antidepressant trials produced scientific literature that was biased and profoundly misleading, a tale of persistent scientific misconduct that has now been reviewed by many authors. But STAR*D was a publicly-funded trial, and of course we would hope and expect that the results would be honestly reported.
So, with the new paper authored by Edmund Pigott, Allan Leventhal, Gregory Alter, and John Boren as a guide, let’s go through the scientific sins. The results consisted primarily of two data sets, the percentage of patients whose depression remitted, and then the percentage of remitted patients who stayed well during the one-year followup, and thus we can review whether the NIMH and the STAR*D investigators accurately reported those results, and also disclosed the relevant data.
A. The percentage of patients whose depression fully remitted
What was reported
The STAR*D trial was designed to test whether a multistep, flexible use of medications could produce remission in a high percentage of depressed outpatients. Those who didn’t get better with three months of initial treatment with an SSRI (citalopram) then entered a second stage of treatment, in which they were either put on a different antidepressant or given a second drug to augment an antidepressant. Those who failed to remit in step two could go on to a step three, and so on; in total, there were four treatment steps.
In a November 1, 2006 press release the NIMH announced the positive news. “Over the course of all four levels, about 70% of those who did not withdraw from the study became symptom free.”
In an article published at the same time in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers — in the abstract of the article — told a similar story. “The overall cumulative remission rates was 67%,” they wrote. In the text of the article, they did note that this was a “theoretical” remission rate, as “it assumes that those who exited the study would have had the same remission rates as those who stayed in the protocol.”
Still, the 67% figure was the bottom-line message being communicated to physicians and the public, and in a paper published in 2007, titled “The STAR*D Project Results: A Comprehensive Review of Findings,” the researchers emphasized this bottom line: “With all steps included, almost 70% of participants who remained in the study experienced remission. Patients and clinicians are encouraged not to give up.”
The actual results
Now the investigators did publish charts with data on the number of patients who stayed in the trial and actually remitted, and after I plowed through those charts, I calculated that 1854 of the 3671 patients (50.5%) who entered in the trial remitted at some point during these four steps of treatment. (I wrote about this in an earlier blog.) However, as Pigott and his collaborators make clear in their paper, even this percentage, from a scientific standpoint, is an inflated number. Read more…
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