Jane Alexander is the author of the blog Adventures of a rebel Taoist. Today she takes on Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, whose book is widely admired by those who believe in the chemical cure.

Well, I have something to say to you Kay Redfield Jamison author of Unquiet Mind and steadfast promeds advocate. I consider the unasked-for treatment of my bipolar symptoms with psychiatric medication to be medical malpractice. The treatments you espouse so enthusiastically did nothing but poison me. When I first read your opinion in your book I wondered for a few seconds if it wasn’t possible to sue you somehow for influencing my psychiatrist and caregivers to ‘treat’ me with your horrible lithium.


I also find that you wimped out of the full scope of bipolar treatment. You took the lithium but you never took the brain damaging antipsychotics even though you admit you were ‘floridly manic’. You are missing out on the full ‘bipolar treatment experience’, doc. You don’t know what it’s like to be that patient whom you told, “You’ve been given a shot of Haldol. Everything is going to be alright.” It didn’t turn out to be all right did it?


Further in, she has the gall to blame the man’s mania on his lack of lithium. I am not joking. Page 107 “Neither the resident nor I needed to see the results of the lithium blood level that had been drawn during his admission to the emergency room. There would be no lithium in his blood. The result had been mania.”

I mean give me a break, ‘doctor’. How you can be so unscientific as to posit this man’s psychotic episode as the result of a lack of lithium, (and not some other kind of trigger, like, I don’t know, maybe… stress?) This is kind of like how a headache is the result of not having aspirin in your blood, right? Sure. Makes perfect, logical, scientific sense Kay. No. Not really.

The full rebel Taoist’s dismantling of KRJ’s near sainted status with the biochemical crowd can be found here.

I was planning not to post about the recent tragedy in Arizona in which a disturbed young man killed and injured a number of people at a political rally.

I decided to say something in support of people like you and me who believe that there is another way. We will be shouted down by people who believe that mental illness is a brain disease in need of lifelong medication and that if only this young man had been on medication (properly “treated”) then this all would have been avoided. The biochemical group will be vocal, but not as influential as the gun lobby, which will make a better ($$) case that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Anybody who has a son or daughter sliding into mental illness knows what paranoia is. It is scary and unpleasant to witness. People who are exhibiting signs of paranoia are racist, suspicious, and abnormally interested in the current gods of mythology, e.g. political figures, the CIA, the KGB (if you are Russian), the Stasi (if you were East German), movie stars, and religious figures. This preoccupation goes with the territory of paranoia. There is nothing abnormal about the accused in this regard when you compare him to thousands of others of the same age (22) and sex (male) who are also exhibiting signs of paranoia.

Here I’m going to get shouted down by readers when I say that chances are, if this young man’s problems had been recognized and treated sooner, had he been on medication, chances are this scene could have been avoided.

I’ll start with the “had he been on medication.” Sure, had he been on medication, he would have been considerably slowed down, his paranoia may have subsided to a dull grumbling sound, and he would have been home on the couch or in bed, not toting a gun to a rally. But, my concern is for what happens after this. Millions of other young men are being forced, through government policies, insurance companies, lobby groups, pharmaceutical companies and doctors, to sacrifice the rest of their lives to medication for the deeds of one of their own: a young man with the same problems that the health care system won’t properly treat.

The mental health care system, such as it exists in most of the Western world, refuses to address a young man’s mental health crisis holistically. It has constructed a fortress of terror in the mind of the public that so-called mental illness is a chemically driven urge that can be fixed by dumping more chemicals on top of more chemicals. Despite the fact that there is no genetic marker, no scientifically proven test for “diseased brains,” it has convinced a gullible public that mental illness is virtually untreatable without these drugs. Once you are sucked into these drugs, such as our sons have been, the pressure is on to continue to medicate. The health care system in most jurisdictions pays for medication but not lengthy therapy. And yet the National Alliance on Mental Illness is puzzled why 80% of people with a mental health diagnosis are unemployed. It’s hard to hold down a job if you haven’t really addressed the underlying problems of your life.

This young man’s crisis could be sorted out eventually if he has access to a better way — support, sympathy, understanding, recognition that good mental health is a journey. “Eventually” means it takes time. It takes effort. It takes understanding of what paranoia is. Your son and my son are lucky it never got this far. This young man’sconfused mind can be healed, but the trauma of what he did will never go away. That’s punishment enough, in my opinion. Considerably less evolved members of the public will want to sort out his problems through life imprisonment or the death penalty.

So, yes, as a mother, I have a great deal of sympathy for this young man, which is no less than what I feel for the families of the people he killed and maimed.

Oh dear. After fussing over my sample query letter to the agent and twenty pages of manuscript, reading and rereading them for spelling errors and sloppy sentence construction, I discovered, to my horror, after I pushed the send button, that I had failed to notice a big, fat, mistake. I used a completely wrong word! I never use this word, but I inserted it in my last minute revisions. The word means the opposite of what I intended. It’s as if I had dropped jam on the spot, or squashed a big housefly between the pages. It’s so horribly THERE.

I can’t resend the e-mail with the offending word corrected. Agents would assume I would be a pest as a client, forever cluttering their in-box with the latest “updates.”

So, the deed is done.

Turning to other matters, it’s Chris’s 27th birthday today. Last night the choir made bought him a birthday cake. He was really happy about that. He’s been invited to sing in a local Gilbert and Sullivan production. He’s happy about that. He got the Adyashanti book from his parents and a religous book from Taylor, his youngest brother, about finding  his mission in life. I was impressed that Taylor is encouraging his brother.

Chris has a phone “date” with career intuitive Sue Fredericks this afternoon. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Have a good week-end, everybody.

I’ve been quite busy recently and not able to concentrate on my blog as much as I’d like to. I posted the manuscript for my book on the author’s website authonomy which demands continuous work on my part. I just can’t leave it there if I want to play the authonomy game. The authonomy game is a slippery slope. Inactivity on my part means I topple off the rankings that activity on my part got me to. If I want people to read and comment on my manuscript, I’ve got to be equally generous of my time with theirs. I’m also preparing twenty pages of my manuscript for review by an agent in February. I remind myself, before getting too excited about my daydream of becoming an overnight literary sensation, that I paid $50 for this privilege as part of the writers’ group I’m involved in.

Chris celebrates his birthday tomorrow. Ian and I are giving him a copy of The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment, by Adyashanti. The book is about what happens after you begin to wake up from the dream state. Chris appears to be momentarily stuck on co-existing meaninglessness and superiority. These sticking points, according to the book’s author, are common traps. Ian and I feel that Chris is capable of applying himself to vocational training or further academics or a sense of purpose that fires him up, but right now he doesn’t see the “point.”

What Ian and I are hoping for Chris is that he soon decides to return to ordinary life, something that inspires him enough to get him out of his bathrobe and slippers and get going. Make no mistake about it, Adya teaches, the ordinary state is where you eventually want to be.

Adyashanti, a Zen master, teaches that enlightenment actually eventually leads you back to the ordinary, but with a newfound appreciation of how marvelous the world really is, and how one must work to add their own unique value to it. Chris is still wobbling on enlightenment’s path.

Robert Whitaker, hands down.

I’m rushing today, so am taking the lazy way out and reprinting a review from Amazon about his 2010 book, Anatomy of an Epidemic; Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

Impeccably researched and documented, Whitaker’s book is based on long-term outcome studies that have received almost no publicity from psychiatry and other guardians of the psychiatric establishment, including, of course, the pharmaceutical companies that keep churning out new generations of magic bullets. It’s a multibillion dollar industry with a lot to lose were the full truth about the drug risks disclosed and understood.

While far from an anti-psychiatry or anti-drug polemic, Whitaker’s interviews with patients who are on psychiatric medications are nonetheless heartrending. Also revealing is his disclosure of the brutal treatment meted out to maverick doctors like Peter Breggin, David Healy and Loren Mosher, who all questioned the efficacy of pharmaceutical treatment of mental disorders, from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder and other maladies. Harvard Medical School-trained Breggin was in effect blacklisted. Mosher lost his position with the NIMH over his successful drug-free treatment of patients through the Soteria project he founded. And Healy promptly lost a job offer after publicizing his criticism of SSRIs and their possible relation to suicide.

Happy New Year!

If I were a parent who’s child returned from his or her first semester on campus with a prescription for Abilify or lithium in hand, I would want to sue the university for promoting drug addiction and encouraging depression. Check out this horror story in the New York Times. This story laments the number of students arriving on campus taking drugs for various mental health issues (and predictably overdosing on the drugs they brought from home), and it endorses the idea that it’s then okay to conduct surveys asking students if they are depressed. 

Pharmaceutical companies are, of course, behind these screenings. Follow the money.

She learned she had clinical depression. She eventually conquered it with psychotherapy, Cymbalta and lithium. She went on to form a Stony Brook chapter of Active Minds, a national campus-based suicide-prevention group.

On recent day, she was one of two dozen volunteers in black T-shirts reading “Chill” who stopped passers-by in the Student Activities Center during lunch hour.
 “Would you like to take a depression screening?” they asked, offering a clipboard with a one-page form to all who unplugged their ear buds. Students checked boxes if they had difficulty sleeping, felt hopeless or “had feelings of worthlessness.” They were offered a chance to speak privately with a psychologist in a nearby office. Sixteen said yes.

The depression screenings are part of a program to enlist students to monitor the mental health of peers, which is run by the four-year-old Center for Outreach and Prevention, a division of mental health services that Dr. Hwang oversaw before her promotion to director of all counseling services.

This story also is witness to the triumph of Abilify’s image and market make-over from an antipsychotic to an antidepressant.

The New York Times does not allow comments to this article. It would be flooded with critical comments if it did.

Read the recent NAMI message below. Where does it mention helping 10,000 people each day actually RECOVER from mental illness? Misery loves company is not an incentive to thrive. Let’s dump the hope and inspiration in the general sense, and raise our expectations about recovery.

NAMI.org has become a beacon of hope for more than 10,000 people each day.

Visitors to NAMI.org find information, support and the comfort of knowing that they are not alone in their experience of mental illness.

Whether through one of the site’s comprehensive education portals or personal contact through NAMI discussion groups, millions now have access to the hope and inspiration they so richly need and deserve.

NAMI needs your support to help us continue to sustain, grow and improve this valuable resource. Please donate generously.

I’ve been busy lately and not able to focus much on the blog. My OLF (old lady friend) who I wrote about two posts ago got out of the hospital after three days and is bouncing around like a someone half her age. She was telling everyone she knew that she didn’t need to go to the hospital and I did her no favor by taking her there. So, I read her the Riot Act, telling her that her symptoms were such that I would have been negligent if I didn’t take her to the hospital. What I was trying to impress on her was that at her age, not having regular, reliable medical care isn’t going to work for her much longer. She was having none of it.

This and pre-Christmas preparations have distracted me from being able to focus on cranking out a decent post. Here’s what I was working on before I got side-tracked.

The Drugs Don’t Work is the title of a 2009 article in Prospect magazine (“Good writing about things that matter”). I won’t bore you with summary of the article, except to say that it’s an in-depth review of “The Emperor’s New Drugs,” by Irving Kirsch, yet another book that claims that antidepressant SSRI’s are worse than useless. While many of us are heartened that we finally are getting to hear the bad news about antidepressants and neuroleptics, when it comes to antidepressants, we also know that these kinds of meds work for most people. David Nutt, of Imperial College, who heads one of the largest departments of psychopharmacology in Britain says “Antidepressants work in clinical practice, and everybody knows they work.”

We all know they work, due to something called the placebo effect, and we also know that while they in most cases are quick depression busters, they come with the price tag of side effects. (Peter Jones, psychiatry prof at Cambridge University, makes the astonishing claim in the article that no teenager ever committed suicide while in a clinical trial.) Kirsch’s contribution is to point out that there cannot possibly be blinded studies on this particular class of medications because the clinical trial participants will quickly figure out if they are on an SSRI because they will be experiencing side effects.

The key to the placebo effect in clinical trials is expectation. People who believe they are taking the real drug are more confident that they are improving, and improve they will, even if they are on the placebo. The article explains that research shows the worse your depression, the more you will improve on an SSRI. According to Kirsch, as dosages increase in response to increasing depression, the side effects increase, too, making it more obvious to the patient that they are taking the real drug. So much for double blind trials.

John E. du Pont

I’d like to see the autopsy report.

John E. du Pont, an heir to the du Pont chemical fortune whose benevolent support of Olympic athletes deteriorated into delusion and ended in the shooting death of a champion wrestler, died Thursday in a western Pennsylvania prison. He was 72.

Mr. du Pont was found unresponsive in his cell at Laurel Highlands State Prison near Somerset, Pa., a prison spokeswoman told The Associated Press.

“He had had some illnesses, so we are considering it natural,” Susan McNaughton, the spokeswoman, told The A.P., adding that the Somerset County coroner would make the final determination of the cause of death.

I make a point on my blog not to enter the territory of Gloom because enough people get their fill of gloom from the professionals dealing with “serious mental illness.”

This week-end has been gloomy. The winter weather where I live would make even a cock-eyed optimist slit his wrists, but it’s actually loneliness I’m speaking of. I spent part of Saturday night in an ambulance accompanying an elderly friend to the hospital. On reflection and without knowing further medical details, I believe that her extreme loneliness caused neurological symptoms.  I found her sitting in a darkened apartment, her skin was flaming hot to the touch, and she had a look of shock on her face. She kept repeating that she didn’t feel well and that she was so sad. Well, she has every reason to be sad. Her beloved husband passed away three years ago last month, the Christmas season is fast approaching, and she lives completely alone.

This brings me to the next story. Chris visited a friend on Saturday night who he met at the day program he attended a few years ago. The friend is living with two cats in subsidized housing. I sent Chris off with a couple of good steaks to accompany their jamming session because his friend’s refrigerator is usually empty. Chris told me that his friend doesn’t understand why his family keeps him at a distance and that most people find him strange. He’s been living on an electrical apprentice stipend of $20 a day for the past five years. Since he lives far from the training site, occasionally he is forced to take a cab. The people who run this sheltered workshop type of arrangement criticize him for taking a cab when he’s paid so little. He’s thinking of quitting.

I suspect that this sheltered workshop arrangement is the final step of the program that they both attended. Chris was encouraged to try out furniture repair after the program ended. Chris never learned furniture repair. The whole experiment fizzled out through lack of interest on his part. Since he emerged from the “recovery” program in pretty marginal shape he didn’t enthusiastically embrace the work. He sat on a chair, sipping a coffee, watching the work, not doing it. The day program had the best of intentions, of course, but, as the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

This sheltered workshop is a “good idea” that doesn’t work for a lot of people, maybe because it’s stigmatizing. It says to the individual that something isn’t right with him while perhaps punishing the individual for living marginally, as was the case with Chris’s friend. Recovery does take a while and one wonders where would the person be if these programs weren’t available. In the absence of an encouraging family that person may well be on the streets.

Being separated from the family can be an outgrowth of the “good intention” approach. I maintain that more families would nurture their relatives if they weren’t put off by the gloomy diagnosis in the first place. Families need to be told that complete recovery is indeed expected and here’s what they can do to help. Instead, the doctors tell us that our children have brain diseases and will have to take medications their entire lives. Maybe they can live productively, but don’t count on it. The medical model encourages sheltered workshops and subsidized housing. The individual becomes a problem from the families’ perspective. People like Chris’s friend are the biggest victims in this way of thinking.

Extending the hand of friendship is a powerful influence on outcomes in people’s lives. Words and gestures can turn lives around.