Borderline Families

My son joined me in Denver to help me move my daughter to yet another facility during the first week of January, 2008. There are services which you can hire to do this. A flight buddy who picks up the person and drops them off wherever you need them to go.

I actually considered hiring someone to fly with my daughter. The contagious nervous and excited energy of the travelers at the airport sends my daughter into overdrive. In recent months, we were on seven cross country flights that had stressed both of us.

Denver to LA. It was horrible.

A representative from Milestones was waiting for us at baggage claim at LAX.

“Who are you?” My daughter looked at her and then back at me incredulously. “What’s this, Mom? I thought we were going to rent a car. I have some things that I have to pick up on the way.”

“They were nice enough to send a car for us. You can go shopping another time, after you get settled.” Just like in Boulder, the site of the treatment center from which she had been tossed that morning, my daughter yearned for things and I wouldn’t/couldn’t satisfy her needs.

“I am sorry that we won’t have time to stop on our way to Milestones. But, I’m sure it can be arranged to have someone pick up whatever it is you need.” The driver said this looking straight at my daughter. My daughter turned on her heel and stomped outside for a cigarette. The driver followed close behind.

My son caught up to us with a luggage cart piled high with bags. He had been disconnected, checking his phone, returning calls, and keeping some distance between himself and his sister since we got off the plane. My daughter had embarked on a drug-taking extravaganza mid-flight that was beyond description and which had left my son and me shell-shocked.

For the rest of the flight, she had twitched and wiggled incessantly and after my son had asked her, with a calming hand on her knee, to try to sit still, to try for a minute not to move, and she had screamed at the top of her lungs, “Get your hand off of me!”, he had backed away. I could see that he had made the decision, consciously or not, to help where he could, but to remove himself emotionally.

We dropped into our own worlds when we climbed into the van for the drive up the coast. We detached for breathing space, like half-time at a game. The driver commented on the sites along the way. Fires had torched huge sections of the hillside and jumped the highway forcing it to closed just a week earlier. My son leaned over and  pointed to the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier, the American icon of fun-in-the-sun. The sky was clear and the air was cool and the mid-day sun glinted off the ocean creating a scene so unfamiliar to my mid-winter mid-western sensibilities I felt like a foreigner.

When the driver turned off the highway and headed into the hills, my daughter groaned.

“What the f**k. Where are we going? Where is this place?” She sounded kidnapped, like her life had been burglarized right there in the van.

“Milestones is in the Santa Monica Mountains. You will love it. It is absolutely beautiful.” The driver didn’t notice her obvious panic. Or, she was conditioned to ignore the bumps along the road.

My daughter rolled her eyes.

When things are very bad, as they were right then, I try to shift my viewpoint to get an unfiltered glimpse into my daughter’s world. If I was right, as we drove up and away from the ocean, my daughter felt like a hatchet had come down, severing her from any remaining grip on the controls that she still had on her life. The dread that she was experiencing must have felt like riding an out-of-control bike down a switchback in the Alps. She was plummeting and couldn’t find the brakes.

It was as if she were three again, red in the face, and crying that wail that pierced my heart, when something didn’t go her way. The anger we had seen since picking her up in Denver, I knew, was in response to her unbridled fear. “I’m scared!” she was screaming with her obscene tirades and attention-getting performance.

For the moment that I slipped into the chaos of her mind, her emotions were running wild and wreaking havoc with her perceptions. The arguing with everyone and the ejection from AIM House was traumatic. The pack-up-and-get-out-now felt devastating. She missed the friends she had made in Boulder.

My daughter had no idea what to expect from Milestones, which apparently was off in the boondocks somewhere in the distant hills. She was anxious and sad and pissed off. She wanted to manage her own life but we had been told time and time again by the psychiatric “professionals”  that she lacked the skills to prove that she could.

She wanted a clean slate, a new start, without anyone watching, without treatment. She wanted to step away from herself, refreshed, for once. My heart beat faster. I felt a rush of panic. I closed my eyes to calm my pulse and blocked out the day. I focused on my world – my ordered house, my loving husband, my ordinary daily routines and I recovered my reality, my comfort zone. And, my heart broke again for my daughter.

When I looked up, her head was leaning against the window on the passenger side. I contemplated her reflection in the side mirror as she squinted across the canyon. She sighed, closed her eyes and I saw her surrender to utter exhaustion and disappointment. I wanted to gather up her slumping shoulders and banish the uncertainty. I wanted to organize and arrange everything in her mind so it made sense. If only I could get in there and do that, be her mind’s housekeeper.

I had convinced my daughter that residential treatment was a good idea and that she needed a stay a hospital, all at the recommendation of the doctors she saw. Now, I needed to persuade her to apply herself to this program, work their agenda, do what they asked, without question, without conflict.

I had been convinced that my daughter need outside help by repeatedly being told that she was non-compliant, that she wasn’t trying, that she was obstinate and disruptive. Maybe, I thought as we drove into the hills, if she did it their way, relief would be the reward. I couldn’t fathom how to talk her into trusting in the unknown. My motivation at that point was that I feared she would stay angry and go unchanged, unhappy through the rest of her life. I didn’t know what her motivation was to keep going.

She hated everything that she encountered when we climbed out of the van at Milestones. My son and I were, on the other hand, very impressed. It was beautiful. The Mediterranean climate felt like an analgesic compared to the dull grey bitterly cold morning I had woken up to in Minnesota. The air smelled like sage and the breeze blew in the tall pines, swishing softly overhead. There were thick leafy shrubs and cacti. It had rained, and there were also puddles and mud, and my daughter looked like she had landed on the moon. She minced around, jumping from one paving stone to another, scowling.

We were ushered into a trailer which held the admissions desk. My daughter went head to head with the clinical director of Milestones, Dr. Kadish.

“What kind of therapy do you do here?”

“We use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.”

“That doesn’t work for me. Only DBT works. I don’t suppose you offer it here.”

“We combine various methods. I think you’ll see it will work for you, if you give it a chance.”

“I have tried it all. I know what works,” my daughter was adamant. “I’ve ‘tested my beliefs’.” She made quote marks in the air. “I know when my thoughts are distorted or unrealistic. But, I also know that talking about it doesn’t help.”

“How do you handle triggers? I understand that you struggle with mind/body issues, perhaps Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The behaviors that accompany these problems and the debilitating negative emotions that occur with these stressors need to be addressed. We have had good results with Cognitive Behavior Therapy at Milestones.”

“If I spill my guts and tell you every thought that I have or if I tell you my nightmares – which, by the way, I have every night, you could psychoanalyze me. But, I would walk out of here and have a panic attack anyway. Like I do every day. Constantly. I am anxious all the time. So, I have tried pouring out all my fantasies and free-association crap and it doesn’t work.”

“OK, but the more we talk about your unhappiness, your need to take the benzodiazepines and your alcohol use, we might find that your maladaptive beliefs are getting in your way. We don’t want to psychoanalyze you. We want you to talk, try to help us figure out what’s going on.”

“I am ‘dysfunctional’ half the time,” again, the quotation marks in the air. “But it is not because I haven’t tried every mode of therapy thrown at me. I think in black and white, all or nothing. I overgeneralize. I jump to conclusions basing everything on how I feel. Everything feels BAD. I hardly ever use objective reasoning. I ‘should’ get help. But, I know it won’t work. I am not signing myself into Milestones.”

“I gather that you are very smart. I understand that this is very frustrating for you. But, your educated mind can work in your favor, if you train it. If you allow it to be reined-in. It is hard work. I know that. But, it is not impossible.”

My son and I were looking back and forth like we were watching a ping pong match, both of us amazed at the full articulate sentences which we hadn’t heard from my daughter in so long we had forgotten that she could form them.

She is RIGHT! She has talked with people all across the country and look where we are. Echoing in mind mind, I heard the program directors all say, “She is very sick.” I was lost.

Milestones coddled my daughter. They bribed her by saying if she applied herself to the program, followed orders, went to the meetings, they would rent her a drum set. The sun-filled room where they were going to set it up looked out over a lush hillside. There were very few fellow participants in this program but, luckily for her, there were a couple of musicians.

She didn’t follow orders and was kicked out before the drum set arrived.

With each move, a new doctor would access my daughter and give her yet one more label from the DSM and create new combinations of psychopharmaceuticals to test on her. Things escalated. Her behavior seemed dictated by the surrounding – almost as if she acted according to how people thought she she should behave.  When in a psych hospital….

I didn’t know my daughter during these years. She had been kidnapped by the psychiatric system. The drugs they fed her were making it harder to be herself. She was admitted and asked to leave from five psychiatric institutions. Too keep up, I visited nine.

What the psychiatric industry could never stamp out was my daughter’s anger and frustration. In the end, her disappointment at not getting better and her irritation at not being listened to were her incentive to flee the system.

Uncategorized Benzodiazepines, Milestones Ranch, non-compliance, treatment resistant

I was cleaning out the kids’ bathroom cabinet yesterday and I ran across a roll-on tube of perfume. It stopped me dead in my tracts.

At the beginning of August, 2007, my daughter and I arrived in Houston, Texas, in order for her to be admitted to the Menninger Clinic. We had been told by the staff at the residential community from where she had just been booted that that she would need a more appropriate wardrobe for her stay in Houston. A robe and more concealing clothing.

We shopped at a downtown mall. We were nervous and unsure of ourselves, holding up pieces, nodding and cringing. Every sales clerks who asked if we wanted help, brought home the fact that this was an uncomfortable situation – the necessity of scrutinizing each item through the lens of psychiatric institutional care.

My stomach was in knots while my daughter deliberated. She unpacked and repacked repeatedly on Saturday and Sunday. By Monday morning, she was wasted by anxiety. I had barely slept.

The Menninger Clinic is beautiful, pristine, in fact. A tall wrought iron fence and overhanging trees obscured the parking area from a busy commercial road. We pulled into a shady spot facing the entrance and rolled down the windows. The chirping of songbirds and the drone of insects filled the car. The lawns and flower beds next to the walkways were edged by a meticulously kept border. The pavement and beds of red flowers, deep green foliage and black earth were wet, hosed down and scrubbed for the new day. The morning air, already thick with humidity mingled with the car’s air-conditioning. The sun was powerful at 10 AM, beating hard through the canopy of trees overhead.

I was scared. I felt untethered to the world outside of my daughter and me. I had pulled the fraying threads that held us to one another tightly against my chest and clung fast all weekend. But, I knew that my daughter would stay here without me and I would go back to Minnesota alone.

A psychiatric facility can look very deceiving from the outside. Menninger was misleading from all perspectives. This neat, controlled environment was a sham. But, at that time in our lives, we were desperate to believe the “experts” in the psychiatric industry. This orderly, groomed setting would become a frightening mask in no time. Until then, I was at their mercy.

Sitting in the car, I was concerned with how the separation would happen. Not just for her, but for me as well. Would I be able to unhook myself and leave my daughter behind? There had been too many heart-racing moments, too many near-catastrophes leading up to this moment. My instinct to protect her was in overdrive. Would our parting be abrupt and formal? Would that be easier for my daughter? Like in pre-school when the teacher advised me to just leave, no matter that she was crying her eyes out, clinging to my legs and pleading to return home with me.

I wanted to protect her and I had to keep it together. I just wanted to be ready. My daughter’s separation anxiety lasted one day when she was three. But, she had had such a difficult time this weekend, asking questions while trying to get ready that I had no answers for.

“What will I do there all day?” I didn’t know.

“Who will be there?” Probably people just like you.

“Will there be a Nurse Ratched?” (Hint of a smile.) No, she is a movie character.

But, of course, I wondered, too, about all her questions and more. How would they help her? How long would it take? Then what?

Either I had to turn the car back on to cool us off or we had to go inside.

“Ready?”

“No.”

“We’ll leave your bags in the car and come back for them later. Let’s go in.”

We climbed out and were hit by an even denser wall of damp air. It seemed that no oxygen accompanied the moisture entering my lungs. Stay strong, I told myself as I felt like I was suffocating. All foot traffic entering the clinic was channeled through the main doors at the center of the administration building. The whole single-story complex of unattached buildings was hidden from the parking lot and surrounding roads by thick shrubs and overhanging trees. Concealed within that hedge was another fence and security gates that contained the 14 acres of the hospital’s campus.

There was a twenty degree difference in temperature as we pushed through the first set of double doors. A woman in an office with a sliding glass window noticed us before I found the doorbell and she buzzed us in. I wondered if I would ever get used to leaving my daughter locked in. Another drop of twenty degrees sent the air temperature to somewhere in the 50’s. I shivered and stood in front of the window. The woman was wearing a sweater but rubbed her arms.

“It is cold in here today. The warmer it is outside, the colder it is in here. What is your name?”

The intake process took nearly all day. There was an uncomfortable anticipation heading in and out of buildings as my skin went from goose flesh to sweating in an instant.  I was on high-alert all day anticipating being physically uncomfortable. Mentally, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, “NO, This is NOT happening.”

Towards the end of the day, two attendants lugged my daughter’s bags into her room and began to go through each piece of clothing. They dug their hands into every pocket. They squeezed all the seams of every item through their fingers, prodding and picking at the thickest parts trying to find and dislodge contraband. The labels on her hair and body potions were scrutinized. Anything with alcohol was set aside.

It was at that point that I slid a roll-on jasmine-scented perfume bottle behind a stack of books on her desk.

I don’t know why I did it. I suppose it was in solidarity with my daughter who I knew would do nothing but dab a little of the prohibited stuff on and feel like a renegade. I was reacting to the dehumanizing treatment. I would, a couple of hospitals down the line, adhere to the rules better ; I was eventually beaten down.

The room was bigger than other hospital rooms she had been in. But, it had the same institutional feel; a sheet of tin over the sink in the bathroom stood in for a mirror and blocky wooden furniture lined the walls. Her desk had a locked drawer but it didn’t work and maintenance was called.

I was asked to leave. Although the well-tended watchful atmosphere encouraged me to believe that my daughter was in good hands, the truth was that it was all just a well-oiled machine and nothing, not my daughter’s recalcitrant behavior, not my asking too many questions, not even me at the end of her stay pleading that they address her escalating anxiety, nothing was going to get in its way. They stripped her of benzodiazepines and left her in pain and ignored her withdrawal and then asked her to leave – insisting that we were NOT to bring her home but that we had to choose another facility for further treatment.

The Menninger Clinic “accepted” a patient, pushed them through their series of classes, and sent them on their way.  In our estimation, she left worse than when she entered. This was echoed time and again from other parents of young adults attending at the same time as our daughter.

When everyone left my daughter’s room, she flopped across the narrow bed. I laid sideways across her and hugged her hard. I whispered fiercely into her ear that I loved her.

I walked out through the main room where the changing of the guard was taking place. The day staff was heading home and the evening staff was getting the lowdown on what was going on in the unit. Kids were sitting in front of the TV, more kids were outside smoking in the gazebo and a few were standing in the middle of the room, looking like they were waiting for something. Everyone was watching me. A big African American man with an affectionate smile unlocked the door for me.

He looked me in the eye and said, “She’ll be just fine. Go and take a break. You deserve it.” He must have read the unmitigated grief that had taken over. I felt like falling into his arms and crying. I smiled back up to him and said that I hoped so, feeling all the while that I wasn’t sure that I was doing the right thing. I threaded my way back along the covered paths to the administration building. Another freezing trek through the main building and I was back where we started in the morning, sitting in my hot car, trying to breathe.

The perfume was a memory of her life – before this journey we took looking for relief began. It meant something to me then.

Now, years later, it has been abandoned in her childhood bathroom. I started laughing when I found it, relieved that it hadn’t been confiscated by the staff at the Menninger Clinic.

Uncategorized benzodiazepine withdrawal, Menninger Clinic, psychiatric hospitals

Last week I received an invitation from The National Empowerment Center for an event on November 8th in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. They have a great program planned but I couldn’t focus on it because I got stuck on the venue  – The Red Lion Inn  – right across the street from a psychiatric hospital where my daughter spent nearly a year.

It was from The Austen Riggs Center that she fled for her life in February, 2009. She has spent the last year and eight months withdrawing from the truckloads of drugs they had her on and trying to see herself as a person with a soul worth saving.

Back when we were still duped by the psychiatric industry and searching the country for relief for the problems which seemed to escalate with each admission and expulsion from hospitals and treatment facilities, I spent hours pacing the rooms of the Red Lion Inn.

On each visit, I found my daughter worse than the time before. I sat in those rooms searching the internet for information on drug combinations and learned for the first time about tardive dyskinesia after watching my daughter’s right arm slashing out into space over lunch.

The Austen Riggs Center lures their clients in by telling them that they are the “premier facility” for the “treatment resistant patient”. We were desperate after years of being told that my daughter was “non-compliant”, would be medicated for life and would never live on her own outside of a residential treatment.

What we discovered was that Austen Riggs is no different than any local psych ward. Despite their unlocked door policy, they rely heavily on drugs to subdue their clients.

It has been a struggle to come off all the psych drugs but my daughter has made it and is living competently on her own in New York City.

I wrote a note to Leah Harris one of the organizers. When I didn’t hear back from her after a couple of days, I assumed she wrote me off – an overwrought mom or a random person looking for a fight. The thing is, this is not where I expected to continue my “fight”.

I have quickly become a vocal advocate for change in the mental health system. I am not shy and have been very present on facebook and in the blogosphere – writing rebuttals to ridiculous pieces in the in the Huffington Post by DJ Jaffee and Craig Garner, recently searching the net for the first publications which talked of overhauling the psychiatric system and I have opened up about my conversion from a “follower  of the doctor’s orders” in revealing and often difficult posts.

Is Austen Riggs affiliated with this event? If so, WHY?

This was my question to Ms. Harris. I could get over the fact that I never wanted to see the quaint, historic streets of Stockbridge again, even if I think it is appalling that they subject people to staying in the only available place for visitors to the Austen Riggs Center. But, tell me – why Stockbridge?

Uncategorized Austen Riggs Center, MA, National Empowerment Center, Stockbridge, Tardive Dyskinesia, The Red Lion Inn, treatment resistant

My daughter came home in August. I said NO!NO!NO!NO! to my husband and steeled myself. I can do this. I can do this. I saw my routine of  writing and reading, dog walking and movies vanish with my concentration. It always happens in a flash. One day my daughter is in New York City, LA, Chicago and the next, trembling from little sleep and hours on the phone trying to understand what she has been saying between gasping sobs and thunderous screams, I am driving to the airport. And there she is.

No matter in what state I find her, she makes my heart sing. I love her so much. I think that I would do almost anything to insure a string of happy days for her. She slept the first week she was home. Then, she emerged from her room, asked me to paint it and to look for a surgeon to fix her foot.

Settling in was hard. Nothing was right. Minnesota - in its entirety – people, places and things was just basically inept and dull. My husband and I held our tongues and continued to slog our way through our trifling lives. (I love it here. It is beautiful, the community supports the arts, and  I am never bored.)

I took advantage of her being home by getting some good food and vitamins into her system. She started to see an acupuncturist. The first needle in the top of her head diffused more than one mercurial mood swing.

After her surgery, we fell into a pattern of physical therapy, acupuncture and visiting the naturopath. The weeks revolved around appointments and long drives between places. I was the chauffeur. She began to relax. “Hey, it’s not so bad here…”

I HAVE TO REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

Things fall apart. When they do it is dramatic and scary and loud and weird and confusing and hurtful and THEN IT PASSES. This is the part I forget.

It passes.

If I wait. If I become involved only minimally, just enough to make sure that she doesn’t hurt herself  and that she doesn’t cut all her clothes to bits (too short, sleeveless, odd parts missing), or her hair off (“I should have bangs.” “I am out of proportion, I need less here..”) Cutting things is her way of avoiding self-harm. Sometimes she slips.

If I stand guard, deflect the punches and verbal blows, without the heavy drugs that used to fuel these episodes, they pass.

I love it that they pass! Recently, one particularly bad episode had me up all night monitoring her after she took an Ambien overdose. (I cannot protect her from herself completely no matter how hard I try.)  Anyway, the very next day I got her out and she began to climb out of the sadness. Not months later. No fogginess after the Ambien wore off. Just my daughter, sad but healing. Completely present.  I remember how these episodes used to last for months, my daughter groggy, clumsy and angry.

Now, she is ready to return to New York.

When she leaves, she won’t keep taking the vitamins. She won’t see an acupuncturist. She won’t cook for herself. She will have an unlimited supply of Ambien and Klonopin from the quack doctor who fills her prescriptions.

It was wonderful to see improvement – less volatile mood swings, a healthier GI tract, relationships forming. Will it last? Will the improvements hold?

I am not a religious person. I begged for help from some higher power before and didn’t see a hint of divine love shine on our lives. But I will surrender now and if there is a God, this would be a good time to step in.

Let go, let God.

Uncategorized

Lately I have been spending more time on facebook than on my blog. The exchange is faster and the community of people from all over the world are available 24/7 to comment and get a discussion rolling.

A week ago I posted Loren Mosher’s Letter of Resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. On December 4, 1998, Dr. Mosher, a pioneer in establishing programs of psychosocial community care in the field of psychiatry – the Soteria House, wrote a letter that slammed the APA. He refers to the APA as the American Psychopharmacological Association.

“Unfortunately, APA reflects, and reinforces, in word and deed, our drug dependent society….  This is not a group for me. At this point in history, in my view, psychiatry has been almost completely bought out by the drug companies. The APA could not continue without the pharmaceutical company support of meetings, symposia, workshops, journal advertising, grand rounds luncheons, unrestricted educational grants, etc. etc. Psychiatrist have become the minions of the drug company promotions.”

“In addition, APA has entered into an unholy alliance with NAMI.. such that the two organizations have adopted similar public belief systems about the nature of madness. While professing itself the champion of their clients the APA is supporting non-clients, the parents, in their wishes to be in control, via legally enforced dependency, of their mad/bad offspring.”

“DSM IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document..  DSM IV has become a bible and a money making best seller… There is neither a blood test nor specific anatomic lesions for any major psychiatric disorder… APA as an organization has implicitly (sometimes explicitly as well) bought into a theoretical hoax.”

The response from the facebook community  after I published this letter was great. Many were not familiar with Dr. Mosher and delighted by the wisdom they read and others were happy to be reminded of Dr. Mosher and shared their experiences of working with him. Together we lamented the loss of such a great man who died in 2004. We were all in awe of his courage to come out so publicly against the revered APA and pharmaceutical industry.

Later in the week I posted  The HIghlander Statement and Call to Action.

(I am not sure that this will come up so I have reposted the main part of the statement here. Though I am risking making this blog too long, I want people to have access to it.)

“In the tradition of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Eleanor Roosevelt and thousands of men and women concerned about social justice and progressive change, thirty people with long histories of fighting for human rights in mental health gathered for three days at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. We argued, came to consensus, and then quietly shared our pain, our concerns, our fears, and our hopes for the future.”

The Highlander Call for Action:

We call upon all people committed to human rights to organize and fight against the passage and implementation of legislation making it easier to lock up and forcibly drug people labeled with psychiatric disorders, legislation that is creating the back-wards of the twenty-first century not just in hospitals, but also in our own homes.

We call upon all people committed to human rights to work together to build a mental health system that is based upon the principles of self-determination, on a belief in our ability to recover, and on our right to define what recovery is and how best to achieve it.

We call upon people who have used mental health services to heal each other by telling our stories. We call for the creation of literature and other arts that use our truths to educate, to inform, and to validate our culture and our experience.

We call upon elected officials, political candidates, and those with power over our lives to recognize and honor the legitimacy of our concerns through their policy statements, legislative proposals, and their actions; and we herby give notice that we will do whatever it takes to insure that we are heard, that our rights are protected, and that we can live freely and peacefully in our communities.”

At the end of the week I published the Principles adopted by the 1982 gathering of psychiatric survivors.  Each year in the 1970’s and 1980’s there was an annual gathering of psychiatric survivors. It became known as the “International Conference on Human Rights and Against Psychiatric Association”.

Statement of Principles from the 10th Annual International Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression was drafted at this meeting.  30 Principles to pay attention to!

I highlighted a couple which generated lots of comments.

#5- We oppose forced psychiatric procedures because they humiliate, debilitate, injure, incapacitate and kill people.

I wrote in the comments -Ativan injections throw a wet blanket over the population of the psych wards in this country. Repeated throughout the day, everyone is a sad shadow of themselves – bored and dejected. They are subjected to bad food, usually an overworked and undereducated staff, and little control over how to proceed with their lives.

A woman wrote in a following comment that she was “Currently sitting in the communal tv room of a psych hospital and there is little conversation and a group of people who are over medicated while the nurses have yet another tea break.”

#17 – We oppose the medical model of “mental illness” because it dupes the public into seeking or accepting “voluntary” treatment by fostering the notion that fundamental human problems, whether personal or social, can be solved by psychiatric/medical means.

The thread following this post swayed a reader who started firmly entrench in the psychiatric medical model. At first he just listened and wrote a couple of comments seeking information. In his most recent comment he said that he would be very busy this week  revamping his facebook page.

I am paraphrasing here – “Must admit I never stop reading since I put myself in the middle and my eyes are opened a little wider. I checked out a great deal of material.”

He was dismayed to not able to find answers to his questions on the web, most notably not from the American Medical Association. “Everything I tried to get answers for weren’t there.” Then he realized that there is no internship to become a psychiatrist as in other areas of medicine. “Really one just has to be a doctor first, then they begin to learn using us. I think you all opened my mind… did this with very little insulting, I will thank you all for this and continue on my search.”

A collective cheer rose from the participants on this thread. The most startling thing about these posts is that they all originated from documents first written 20, 30, even 40 years ago and they are just as relevant today. Maybe even more so as we search for real changes that have been made and realize that there are very few.

Read these documents!

Join the facebook discussions if you haven’t already (befriend me – Kristin Ulland) and team up with the community trying to make some changes.

More voices, more energy, quicker action!

Uncategorized 30 Principles, facebook, Highlander Statement and Call to Action, Loren Mosher, Loren Mosher's resignation letter from the APA, Soteria House, Statement of Principles from the 10th Annual International Conference on Human rights and Psychiatric Oppression