Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia

People on psych drugs are “consumer leaders”

The NAMI Convention  is now well underway in Chicago. Holistic types seem thin on the ground. While a convention always has an impressive list of speakers and corporate goodwill, are people missing a very fundamental point here, that all the meds and all the institutional “help” can get in the way of cure. Most people I have corresponded with over the years about their mental health have told me that recovery happens off the drugs, and is a very personal story of coming to grips with yourself. My feeling is that a lot of people get lost in the bureaucracy of health care and that becomes the on-going story. Never enough money, the wrong medications, the side effects from the medications, trouble with the insurance company, problems with social housing. The professionals are in charge of the game and making a living from it. I might feel reassured by all the convention hoopla if statistics bore out that vast numbers of people are getting better using all those new drugs and hospital and recovery programs.  Success favors the individual who makes it his or her business to recover.

From the NAMI Convention agenda

1:30pm-5:00pm    Ask the Doctor Sessions and “ASK US”

(A chance to ask questions of top researchers and clinicians sharing work underway to treat and defeat mental illness. You’ll also have the chance to hear important perspectives from our consumer leaders.)

For the record, here is a PARTIAL LIST OF PAST EXHIBITORS AT NAMI NATIONAL CONVENTION (A – M only). The full list is found here.

3dASAP Promotional Solutions
Abbott
Abraham Low Self-help Systems
Allsup
American Psychiatric Nurses Association
American Psychiatric Association
American Psychological Association
Anne Sippi Clinic Adult Community Services
Astrazeneca Pharmaceuticals
Behavioral Tech, LLC
Borderline Personality Disorder Resource Center
bp Magazine and Esperanza
Bristol-Myers Squibb
California Association of Marriage & Family Therapists
Cenpatico
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Changing Options, Inc.
College of Psychiatric and Neurologic Pharmacists
Consortium on the Genetics of Schizophrenia (COGS)
CooperRiis: A Healing Community
Cyberonics, Inc.
Defense Centers of Excellence
Disability Rights Section, U.S. Department of Justice
Dominion Hospital
EmFinders
FDA Office of Women’s Health
Fred Friendly Seminars, Inc.
GlaxoSmithKline
Gould Farm
Hanbleceya Treatment Center
Harmony Behavioral Health
Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center
Hazelden Publishing & Education Services
Hopewell
Institute of Living/Hartford Hospital
International Center for Clubhouse Development
Irwin Foundation
Janssen, Division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Johns Hopkins University
Keffer Software Products, Inc.
Lakewood Center
Lilly
Magellan Health Services
Maguire Publications
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center
McGraw Systems
McLean Hospital
McNeil Pediatrics
MedicAlert Foundation
Meehl Foundation
Menninger Clinic
Mennonite Media Productions
Mental Health Co-op
Merry Meadow Farm
Mytherapysession.com

and

Here is a list of NAMI donors and amounts for 1st Quarter 2011

Bristol-Myers Squibb Campaign for a Better Tomorrow $100,000

Bristol-Myers Squibb NAMI Family to Family Education Program $62,500

Bristol-Myers Squibb NAMI Corporate Supporter Membership $25,000

The George Cohee Foundation General Donation $6,034.00

The Susan Stein Shiva Foundation General Donation $5,000.00

Anonymous General Donation $200,000.00

Anonymous General Donation $200,000.00

Allsup, Inc. HelpLine $25,000.00

Pfizer Multicultural Action Center $10,000.00

Bristol-Myers Squibb Campaign for a Better Tomorrow $100,000

Bristol-Myers Squibb NAMI Family to Family Education Program $62,500

Pfizer Treatment Access Education and Outreach Project $25,000.00

Pamlab Corporate Supporter Membership $35,000.00

Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceutica NAMI Beginnings $60,000.00

Shire Child & Adolescent Action Center $150,000.00

Pfizer Campaign for a Better Tomorrow $25,000.00

The Van Ameringen Foundation Parents & Teacher as Allies $45,000.00

$1,136,034

Major Foundation and Corporate Contributions Registry

TOTAL: $2,084,568

Valet service

Chris is doing everything for us except donning the uniform and flicking lint off our shoulders with a brush. His agenda is blank now that the summer is here and his voice teacher is on vacation, choir and amateur opera rehearsals are in hiatus, and his part time employer is also away. Oh, yes, Dr. Stern is away for most of the summer, too.

So, here’s what he’s doing. Menu planning, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, pick-up and delivery of Ian’s shirts, cleaning the apartment once a week, sorting the mail and accepting the delivery of packages. In his spare time (there’s still a lot of it), he has initiated the process for becoming a citizen in this fair country and is dealing with the bureaucracy involved.

Though he says he’s feeling overwhelmed (he’s a young man, after all, housework is stressful), he does this all so enthusiastically and well that it raises the question, why isn’t he in full time work or back at university or in vocational training? It’s been seven years now since his first hospitalization, and ten years since we began to suspect something was not right. His intellect is not impaired, he’s much better than he’s ever been, but he’s still hanging around the apartment with Ian and me, his parental units.

I do believe that people who have experienced what Chris has gone through tend to be too self-sacrificing for their parents and others, no thought for themselves. This is something to be worked through, but how? Being a valet to his parents surely isn’t helping, unless this is just something he has to do as part of the working it out process. Our situation is a bit complex in that we are not citizens of the country we are living in, and Ian and I do not intend to stay here after we retire. This means that if Chris wants to remain here with his brother Alex after we leave, he’ll need citizenship. What he would do here without a skill is beyond me, but that’s a long way off, in any case, and maybe by then he’ll have one.

I know Chris is thinking about possible directions, but this is still in the thinking stage. I will be overjoyed when he exercises more structure to his day in a field of his choosing.

The diagnosis changes everything

Schizophrenia at the Schoolgate is a blog written by a married mother of four about her recent “coming out.”  Her Kindle eBook book, Surviving Schizophrenia: A Tale of Sound and Fury is available at the following location. It’s also available at amazon.co.uk and amazon europe. She’s got a great cover, a pastel portrait-like photograph of mother and child. Shades of my own deconstructed Paul Klee image, but pinker and prettier.

Here she writes about her second hospitalization, six years after her first, her entry into a day program, which is when, for the first time, she is told she has “schizophrenia.”

I, on the other hand, have nothing to do. Nothing. I am not smoking now, I have stopped in the hospital again. So I can’t even do that. After a couple of weeks of almost total inactivity I am visited by a community psychiatric nurse. She asks me what I want out of life now that I am out of hospital. I reply that I want something to do, and friends to spend time with. And so she refers me to a day hospital, Hanhemann House in Bournemouth town centre. Here I am to learn to build up my confidence and become a worthwhile member of society again.

At least the immediate worries of how to survive have receded. I am on Social Security benefits, and my rent is paid by the council. I am not smoking and can’t drink with the medication I am taking, and anyway, I am too embarrassed to meet up with my old friends. So I live cleanly, and cheaply. At the day hospital, I am given a hot meal each day.

I have been attending Hanhemann House for almost a month and I have hopes that things may improve. There is no pressure here. We patients are given a little education by the nursing staff on the nature of mental illness, and some half hearted attempts are made to motivate us into activity, but most of the time we are left alone. I feel safe, and relaxed.

But then, in one day, my life changes. The doctors call me in for a meeting. There are at least six people in the room – nurses and doctors of various descriptions. And they break the bombshell to me. I am suffering from schizophrenia. I am schizophrenic. This has been on my records, apparently, for six years already – I was diagnosed when I was just nineteen, at the time of my first breakdown, but at the time it had not been thought appropriate to inform me.  It is a lot to take on board. For the last six years, since my first breakdown, I have thought myself to be normal – nervous, OK very nervous, but essentially normal. During this time I have completed my degree, held down jobs, functioned in society. It has been a struggle, but by and large my life so far has been a success. Yet now I learn that all this time I have apparently had a disabling illness. These people knew about it all along. I have confirmed it by breaking down again.

I am very scared. I am a freak, a social outcast. I am an unknown quantity. A maniac. A schizophrenic. The ‘Team’ then tell me that the prognosis is bad. I ask what is a prognosis. They say I basically have no future. I will get worse as I grow older. I can never expect to be normal. I must accept this, I am told. I must face the fact that I have no future.

I lose all hope at that point. My only comfort is in the medication they prescribe, that induces in me a sort of stupor. The drugs affect my state of mind to such a degree that every action becomes an effort. I decide that it is just not worth making that effort. I switch off now, recede into an almost trance-like state and refuse to take any real part in life. And at Hanhemann House nobody seems to expect anything of me anyway. I can drift along, lounge half asleep on the various saggy and stained sofas provided for the purpose. Occasionally I attend one of the rehabilitative talks that are supposed to be my primary reason for being there, but even here nothing much is expected and I sit in my chair, eyes half open, closing, closing… I start smoking again, because everyone else at the hospital does so and it seems a not unreasonable sort of way to pass the time.

The nurses do try to educate us about mental illness. I learn that schizophrenia affects one per cent of the population. That schizophrenics are not aggressive, and that they are in fact far more likely to hurt themselves than other people. I am told these things, but nothing distracts from the fear that is contained within the word Schizophrenia, and the prognosis that I have been given. My life is effectively over.

Not sorry enough

Dr. Joseph Biederman, the popularizer of the bipolar child phenomenon, and two colleagues, have been called into the principal’s office by the Harvard Medical School and the Massachussetts General Hospital, and, gosh, they are very sorry. Instead of being publically drawn and quartered for accepting pharmaceutical money for promoting dubious research and misleading the public, they have been given the adult equivalent of writing on the blackboard 50 times (okay, once) that they are very sorry that they have brought Harvard and MGH into disrepute, and they will never do it again, or, at least, they will check with their employer first before they accept any more money from industry…  for a year. So, it’s Harvard and MGH that are “upset” about being in the spotlight, and we the public will have to continue to cyberstalk Dr. Biederman et al, until, what? But they are not apologizing for the hell they have wreaked on the public, to which this “apology” letter attests. (Thanks to One Boring Old Man via Stephany and for bringing this wrap-up to my attention.)

One Boring Old Man says that the evidence for the bipolar child is thin on the ground, and he demonstrates in his post how paltry the evidence is that the bipolar child hinges upon. “Over the course of the years between 2000 and 2008, Biederman’s group reported 9 clinical trials [among their 78 articles]. I included this table because I was surprised at how thin it was – seven small open label trials, one retrospective analysis [of someone else’s Janssen financed double blind study], and only one double blind trial of their own. With all the noise they were making, I would’ve expected more:”

We can fight back by continuing to agree from here on in that there is no such thing as childhood bipolar disorder, there never was, there probably never will be. Bipolar is a rare occurence, and was diagnosed only in adults until Dr. Biederman got going. What we have are children acting out. We also have children who act out in a myriad of ways as a result of being given a cocktail of pharmaceuticals that go along with this diagnosis or cause this diagnosis to happen in the first place. I said “acting out.” Head banging rage and talk of suicide is acting out, but try telling that to parents who feel that nobody understands their particular situation. This is not a discipline problem, they insist, my child is really ill. He has (Biederman inspired) bipolar. To which I would say, a problem is still a problem in need of a solution, but it isn’t bipolar.

Anger and irritability can take people’s breath away when a rare child gets going. (I was an extremely angry, irritable child who, if this happened today, might have been placed on an antipyschotic.*) It seems like a mental illness, it walks and talks like a mental illness, but is it a mental illness or is it a failure to understand how to help? Families aren’t getting the kind of help they need because Dr. Biederman and colleagues have sidelined psychological and nutritional support in favor of pharmacogical treatment. For years we have heard that talk therapy doesn’t work but really what was going on was that pharmacology paid more to the doctor, who had no incentive to speak well of the competition. So a real avenue of help has been trashed and it will take quite a while to right that wrong.

____________________
*Holistic thought: I used to vent my spleen a lot, regularly, several times a day in fact. Anybody and anything set me off. For those not familiar with this expression, a spleen is an organ near the stomach that produces and cleanses the body’s blood.** To vent one’s spleen means Fig. to get rid of one’s feelings of anger caused by someone or something by attacking someone or something else. Jack vented his spleen at his wife whenever things went badly at work. Peter vented his spleen on his car by kicking it when it broke down.  There were two events that happened round about the same time that may have turned me into the sweet, good-natured person I am today (irony). When I was eleven years old my spleen was surgically removed. I also remember that just before Christmas, my mother grabbed me by the shoulders and said, in a very menacing tone of voice, that if I ruined one more Christmas for the family she was going to knock my teeth down the back of my throat! Two possibly unrelated events. Same outcome. I changed.

**Cambridge On-Line Dictionary

What ever became of the nervous breakdown?

Remember those? Well, you would if you were around in the 1950s and 1960s. I had a rather sheltered upbringing as a child, and just before high school my family moved from a large city to a small town, a hamlet, actually, so the pool of possible people I might personally know who could suffer nervous breakdowns, suddenly became shrunken.  People who live in hamlets aren’t supposed to be nervous types. That’s for city folk. However, I do remember that the sister of a friend of mine from the hamlet went off to study music at a prestigious music school and she promptly came home mid-way through the first term suffering what everybody whispered was a “nervous breakdown.” Her parents put her in a convent for a year where she played music to her heart’s content before re-enrolling at another university. I had no idea what a nervous breakdown looked like to the naked eye, and I still don’t.  Nervous breakdown people holed up for a while in their homes (or a convent like my friend’s sister) and emerged later to get on with their lives. The family was embarrassed that their relative should be so delicate of mind and spirit, but in truth, a nervous breakdown was not that uncommon. The Rolling Stones sang about their 19th Nervous Breakdown in the late sixties, and then what? Then a mysterious phenomenon swept the land, and suddenly, nobody seemed to have nervous breakdowns anymore.

There was a young man in my graduate program in the early eighties who started acting funny. One day he arrived in the classroom, grabbed the nearest piece of chalk and started scribbling all kinds of mysterious mathematical equations on the board that made infinite sense to him and the Universe. He dropped out but returned to the university a couple of years later and completed the program. I just assumed he had a nervous breakdown. Had he been told he had schizophrenia, well, university might have ended right there for him.

When Chris landed in the hospital in 2003 with his diagnosis of schizophrenia, my father-in-law,  a university professor, was hoping that Chris was only suffering from a “garden variety” nervous breakdown, as he put it, the type of mental condition that seems to go hand in hand with academic pressure and your first year away from home. I hadn’t heard that description of a mental health condition for years.

So, since we almost never hear of someone suffering a nervous breakdown these days, I got curious and did the usual quick Internet search, starting with Wikipedia.

“The terms “nervous breakdown” and “mental breakdown” have not been formally defined through a diagnostic system such as the DSM-IV or ICD-10, and are nearly absent from current scientific literature regarding mental illness.[1][2] Although “nervous breakdown” does not necessarily have a rigorous or static definition, surveys of laypersons suggest that the term refers to a specific acute time-limited reactive disorder, involving symptoms such as anxiety or depression, usually precipitated by external stressors.[1] Specific cases are sometimes described as a “breakdown” only after a person becomes unable to function in day-to-day life due to difficulties adapting.[3]“

If Wikipedia is correct, it sounds to me like the term nervous breakdown doesn’t convey the gravitas needed for long term use of antipsychotics, and therefore it has disappeared from the prescribing Bible.

I was a bit suspicious that there seemed to be no link to psychosis in the Wiki definition, so I checked another website associated with natural remedies, and found much more encompassing symptoms, ranging from Irritable Bowel Syndrome, to seeing people who are not there, to depression and mania, inter alia. “In more extreme cases, psychosis can occur where the person will experience complete loss of contact with reality. The symptoms may include hallucinations or visions, feelings of victimization or persecution, strange speech patterns and behaviors as well as extreme guilt or grandiosity.” The Wiki definition sees a nervous breakdown as something discrete (time limited), mainly to do with depression and anxiety, while the natural health website, perhaps to peddle a variety of natural cures, has made a nervous breakdown something universal.

People who suffered from nervous breakdowns in the past, got over them, whether they were suffering from grandiosity, constipation, or fleeting psychosis. Now that the term is no longer in vogue, and the more ominous labels of schizophrenia and bipolar are, we have seen a shift from a garden variety condition to something chronic.

The latest threshold that psychiatry has crossed

Mommy, am I really bipolar? is the title of a Newsweek piece by Stuart L. Kaplan, M.D. Dr. Kaplan argues that there is no scientific evidence that bipolar disorder surfaces in childhood. Dr. Kaplan goes through the recent history of this diagnosis which began in the 1990s with the book The Bipolar Child, and he discusses how quickly psychiatry and the public rallied around this label. Judging from the force of the comments to this article, mainly all negative in regard to Dr. Kaplan’s opinion, there should be a huge blow coming to psychiatry’s credibility as it tries to backpedal on this diagnosis in children. Why should these parents believe psychiatry now?

As much as I agree with much of what Dr. Kaplan writes, there is a huge credibility problem that has been simmering along for the profession and could boil over. Since psychiatry has put all its efforts into magic bullets it has neglected to figure out how to relieve human suffering. In fact, it has gone out of its way to tell parents that it was dangerously old-fashioned to believe that maybe the family environment has a good deal to do with why the child is behaving in a certain way and that chemicals are the main solution. I would be all in favor of what Dr. Kaplan is saying, except that he undermining this position by further arguing that bipolar in children is most often ADHD, and psychiatry has chemicals to treat that. He also refers to ADHD as less trendy than bipolar. Maybe so now, but not so when my kids were in elementary school. ADD and ADHD was THE buzz with the mothers in the schoolyard. So, all Dr. Kaplan is doing is trading one diagnosis for another diagnosis that has the FDA ‘s blessing for the drugs that are used in children.

Many young parents don’t know what they believe themselves, so they believe their doctor. They believed their doctor, perhaps after initially putting up resistance (or perhaps not), when the doctor told them their child was bipolar. Now, all of a sudden, the same doctor is telling them that the child is not bipolar? How is the doctor going to explain away the drugs and the fact that their kid is still messed up? Why should the parent believe this latest fad un-diagnosis? You would think that a parent would be delighted to hear that their child is inattentive and hyperactive, rather than the more ominous bipolar, but that doesn’t seem to be what is happening with the parents who commented on this article. They are lining up behind the belief that their child is horribly, mentally ill and they don’t want the label dropped. By giving parents this option, psychiatry has created a much bigger problem that has invaded every nook and cranny of family life and parents want to hold psychiatry to it. They won’t be able, to, unfortunately.

Psychiatry should be in big trouble from these parents now that it is backpedalling on the bipolar diagnosis. Memories are short, however. The parents of under 18s now will not be the same group of parents of under 18s ten years from now. The bipolar label is going to be folded into a new label. I’ll let Dr. Kaplan explain the new think:

The tide may be turning. The American Psychiatric Association is deliberating intensely on new criteria that would dramatically restrict this fad diagnosis. One step the association is recommending is a new diagnosis called temper dysregulation disorder, a more accurate way of describing extreme irritability in children. If mental-health professionals can be persuaded to consider these alternative diagnoses, many thousands of children could be spared an unwarranted, stigmatizing label that sticks with them the rest of their lives.

The controversy over bipolar will fade, since there is a good chance the current drugs won’t get approved for use in children, anyway, and the next generation of parents will be snowed once again by the profession using new labels and different drugs.

For those who want off the merry-go-round, this latest controversy is all the more reason to rely on one’s own intuition, to expand one’s belief system, and look to emulate people who have cured themselves.

I’m tempted to report this guy as “inappropriate”

There has been a tremendous outpouring of positive response from New York Times readers to the self-outing of Dr. Marsha Linehan. Dr. Linehan is the creator of DBT therapy, whose story of recovery from a diagnosis of schizophrenia appeared in yesterday’s paper.

Perhaps you can spot the problem in Mark’s take on mental illness. (Well, there are two actually.)

mark
Providence, RIJune 24th, 20119:41 am

Dr. Linehan has done a great service to all people who suffer from emotional and mental problems, and she deserves tremendous praise for having the courage to reveal her personal story. Her story gives hope to those who read it, but the story is more complicated than the Times reports.

Having practiced psychiatry, child psychiatry and primary care medicine for 20 years, I have been impressed that mental illness is a concept that is not as simple as it is often portrayed, and that by oversimplifying it, in tends to stigmatize many people. To begin with Borderline Personality is not a unitary concept, but an aggregate of behaviors and mental and emotional experiences that varies in its intensity and characteristics from one person to the next. There may be 20 or more variants of borderline personality. Many patients who do not meet the DSM criteria are diagnosed with “borderline traits”. Many diagnoses in the DSM are probably best not viewed as mental “illnesses” but rather problems that have complex social, cultural and economic contexts. Among these should probably be adjustment disorders, learning disabilities and substance abuse disorders. While I would agree that Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder are true mental illnesses, we must recognize that sometimes these terms have been used to describe borderline patients and other patients out of countertransference more than because the patient truly met the criteria, out of an expression of anger and frustration at the process of treating people with provocative behavior.
Personality disorders have a strange place in the pantheon of mental disorders (By the way, what is a disorder? Is it equivalent to an illness or something different). As Dr. John Oldham has written in his books on Personality Disorders, these conditions reflect a spectrum of personality traits that range from the normal to the pathological. The pathological is largely defined by the extent of the traits.

Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers Report as Inappropriate.

How we arrived at the mess we are in

I say “we” because even though the references here are mainly U.S.-centric, psychiatry in developed countries has been heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. Here is an excerpt from the second installment of Marcia Angell’s three part review of The Emperor’s New Drugs; Anatomy of an Epidemic; and Unhinged. Dr. Angell is the first woman to have served as editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine.

One of the leaders of modern psychiatry, Leon Eisenberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins and then Harvard Medical School, who was among the first to study the effects of stimulants on attention deficit disorder in children, wrote that American psychiatry in the late twentieth century moved from a state of “brainlessness” to one of “mindlessness.”2 By that he meant that before psychoactive drugs (drugs that affect the mental state) were introduced, the profession had little interest in neurotransmitters or any other aspect of the physical brain. Instead, it subscribed to the Freudian view that mental illness had its roots in unconscious conflicts, usually originating in childhood, that affected the mind as though it were separate from the brain.

But with the introduction of psychoactive drugs in the 1950s, and sharply accelerating in the 1980s, the focus shifted to the brain. Psychiatrists began to refer to themselves as psychopharmacologists, and they had less and less interest in exploring the life stories of their patients. Their main concern was to eliminate or reduce symptoms by treating sufferers with drugs that would alter brain function. An early advocate of this biological model of mental illness, Eisenberg in his later years became an outspoken critic of what he saw as the indiscriminate use of psychoactive drugs, driven largely by the machinations of the pharmaceutical industry.
………

In addition to the money spent on the psychiatric profession directly, drug companies heavily support many related patient advocacy groups and educational organizations. Whitaker writes that in the first quarter of 2009 alone,

Eli Lilly gave $551,000 to NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness] and its local chapters, $465,000 to the National Mental Health Association, $130,000 to CHADD (an ADHD [attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder] patient-advocacy group), and $69,250 to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
 And that’s just one company in three months; one can imagine what the yearly total would be from all companies that make psychoactive drugs. These groups ostensibly exist to raise public awareness of psychiatric disorders, but they also have the effect of promoting the use of psychoactive drugs and influencing insurers to cover them. Whitaker summarizes the growth of industry influence after the publication of the DSM-III as follows:

In short, a powerful quartet of voices came together during the 1980’s eager to inform the public that mental disorders were brain diseases. Pharmaceutical companies provided the financial muscle. The APA and psychiatrists at top medical schools conferred intellectual legitimacy upon the enterprise. The NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] put the government’s stamp of approval on the story. NAMI provided a moral authority.

……………
Growing numbers of for-profit firms specialize in helping poor families apply for SSI benefits. But to qualify nearly always requires that applicants, including children, be taking psychoactive drugs. According to a New York Times story, a Rutgers University study found that children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines.

Read the NYR article here.

The definition of short

So, if we still don’t know what is meant by “short term” use of antipsychotics, is there a doctor in the house or out in cyberspace who can shed some light on this? If I don’t get an answer, shall I assume that nobody is looking seriously at this issue?

The question is quite deliberate on my part. Since most of us don’t get a dress rehearsal for a schizophrenia diagnosis (60% of new “cases” apparently do not have family history), we will find ourselves on medications because we haven’t got a clue that there are other ways of dealing with trauma.

I have heard that the most recent research says (patients have been saying this for years) that medications, if used at all, should be short term. If this is so, then people ought to know what short term is so they, and their doctors, can agree on an end date while bolstering their recovery with alternative therapies. Many doctors will claim that the patient has to be “stable” in order to go off them, while many patients claim that they shouldn’t be on meds in the first place and don’t function well on them. Doctors (pharma) have been getting a free pass up until now because the specifics, if there are any, are cloaked in mystery. I am not referring to how to go about withdrawal (there’s lots of information here), I mean how short is short?

Thanks to Robert Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, we now know that the “medication is to schizophrenia just like insulin is to diabetes” argument was an falsehood (or misconception, depending on how you look at it) that was not clarified by the pharmaceutical companies until the author put the question directly to a pharmaceutical company executive.

If we are starting to hear that drugs, if used at all, should be short term, what is meant by short term?