Invite journalist Robert Whitaker to speak at World Health Organization

The excerpt below* is from a recent address given by Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, at the Mental Health Gap Action Programme Forum.

If you read the mhGap Action Programme guide, mental health care is seen as the domain of the medical profession. Antipsychotic medications are also the first line of treatment for psychosis and for bipolar disorder. This runs contrary to what consumers want. People who actually suffer from these and other mental health conditions often say that the person who made the difference in their recovery was a caring relative, a friend, or more rarely, someone in a clinical setting who actually took the time to talk to them in a caring, empathetic way. This kind of intervention early on has greate potential to help the patient recover quicker.

Running contrary to the consumer’s position, the mhGap Action Programme places the emphasis firmly on interventions that can be undertaken by busy doctors, nurses, and medical assistants. Well, how is a busy doctor or nurse going to fulfill the needed empathetic role in a crisis situation? They’re not. The guide directs the patient to» Encourage involvement in self-help and family support.

What positive, encouraging attitude does the guide promote about the prospects for full recovery?

» Inform the person of the expected duration of treatment, potential side-effects of the intervention, any alternative treatment options, the importance of adherence to the treatment plan, and of the likely prognosis. (Rossa’s comment: This is purely “clinicalese,” very off-putting to patients and family. Will non-drug approaches be considered as alternative treatments? The term “likely prognosis” sounds bad, very bad to me. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy for a dismal prognosis. Also, how is a medical assistant, a nurse or a doctor qualified or even capable of predicting the “likely” prognosis?)

» Address the person’s questions and concerns about treatment, and communicate realistic hope for better functioning and recovery.
(Rossa’s comment: Again, who are the staff to tell us what is realistic? What’s this talk about “functioning?” We demand and expect better than this.)
 
Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, should be invited to speak at the World Health Organization. He can talk about how the use of medications actually prolongues mental illness and, more importantly, in the context of the Mental Health Gap Action Programme, he can talk about the success of the Open Dialogue program in Finland. The Open Dialogue program is purposely staffed by non-medical professionals and resists drug treatment if at all possible.

*Excerpt:

With publication of the mhGAP Intervention guide, we now have a simple technical tool for detecting, diagnosing, and managing the most common, and burdensome, mental, neurological, and substance use disorders, in any resource setting.

The emphasis is firmly placed on interventions that can be undertaken by busy doctors, nurses, and medical assistants working, with limited resources, at first- and second-level facilities. Mental health problems, whether depression, epilepsy, dementia, or alcohol dependence, are real disorders. They cause death and disability. They cause suffering. They have symptoms. And they can be managed, in any resource setting.

This is the message we can now communicate with confidence.

No matter how weak the health system or how constrained the resources, something can always be done.

In a key achievement, the Intervention guide transforms a world of expertise and clinical experience, contributed by hundreds of experts, into less than 100 pages of clinical wisdom and succinct practical advice.
The guide, in effect, extends competence in diagnosis and management to the non-specialist, while respecting their busy schedules.

The universe, the flea market, the zone

I’m stuck on the revision of the next chapter to my book to post at authonomy. I’m trying to write about why I believe that the experience of schizophrenia is particularly relevant to the Big Bang. There are a lot of dots to connect. The chapter attempts to link sub-atomic molecular vibrations, the Fibonnaci number sequence, the experience of sychronicity; a big task for an art history major. Will I have it all figured out and peer-reviewed by the time the next round of nominations for the Nobel Prize takes place?

While I pondered the meaning of the universe, Chris got up early and went to choir. There’s a guest preacher today from Haiti. I’m sitting this one out. I’m not prepared to sit through a two hour church service; I know what happens when there is a guest in the pulpit. The church service almost doubles in length! I’m becoming more of a Buddhist in outlook these days thanks to Chris. (Also a quantum physicist, hahah.)

Ian and I went, instead, to the flea market. I said Ian can come with me if he doesn’t buy the first thing he sees and announce that we’re done.  Men don’t shop like women. They think the point is to go, find what you want immediately, pay the full price and go home. Mission accomplished.

Chris sang in a benefit concert for Haiti last night. He’s looking good these days; got himself a second hand suit for the concert and fussed over the tie he would wear. He’s trying hard to be more of a personality around people. We’ve talked about “the zone.” I explained to him that, rather than zoning out and standing apart from people, which makes all of us uncomfortable, he’s got to enter their zone. He can stick his hand out or poke his face near someone else’s to introduce himself.

He’s entitled to invade their space and he has to start by noticing people not in his own zone, I tell him. Chris is taking this all very good-naturedly. For his entire life he has shown up without being noticed, like a ghost. You just turn around and there he is. Not a sound is made. Over the past few days, when he arrives home, he has taken to announcing himself in a booming voice (for him) “Hi, it’s Chris.” He is actively working on “the zone.”

Instructions for reading my book at authonomy

My manuscript is now available on authonomy at this location.

Go to the side panel on the right and click on “Read the book.” The book will be displayed chapter by chapter. There is a table of contents at the beginning that gives you a better idea of what is happening in each chapter. It’s okay if you just want to pick off the chapters that appeal to you.  You cannot download the book. It must be read on-line.

You are entering a construction zone because the book is not fully uploaded and I make daily changes to it. It still needs editing and a major revision of at least one chapter toward the end. My editor has told me this; I just haven’t had time to do it. I have changed my thinking in some instances and when I go back to rewrite, I will phrase certain things differently.

If you would like to tell your friends about my book, here’s how I would pitch it to pique their interest:

1) I’m a mother writing about her son’s diagnosis of schizophrenia. There are very few mothers (I can think of one only) who have published a book about this sensitive subject.

2) I’m a parent who objects to the current biochemically-driven model of schizophrenia and other so-called mental illnesses. This pits me against the majority of family members and the public-at-large who have gone along with the idea of mental illness as a brain disease. The time is ripe for challenging this view, especially when this criticism is coming from a parent.

3) This book discusses a lot of unusual holistic therapies and helpful attitudes that the family members can adopt that should be better known to the general public. I describe the therapies and the improvements that I saw in Chris that I attribute to the therapies undertaken.

I’d be delighted if you read the book and I welcome your feedback. You don’t even have to tell me that you’ve read it or even bother to read it. I don’t keep a list. If you’d like to comment or push the book to the attention of the greater authonomy community, you’ll have to register. It’s quick and you don’t have to be a writer yourself, but it helps if you like to read and comment on others’ manuscripts. My goal is to generate more support for the position that you and I share about so-called mental illness. Invariably that means a published book.

authonomy says:
Attracting external readership can really boost your visibility on the site. So if you already have champions from outside the authonomy community – whether that’s family, friends, colleagues or visitors to your blog, facebook profile or other website, you might also encourage them to join the site and get involved. If they can prove their credentials to the community by building their talent spotter rank, then they’ll be in a position to be noticed and in turn help you raise the profile of your book.

Please forward, tweet or retweet this post to your friends to let them know that there is a growing number of parents who are refusing to go along with the biochemically driven model of mental illness.

If you have problems viewing the book, please let me know.

My book will soon be available

I’ve been fiddling around for the past few days uploading my manuscript chapter by chapter onto the authonomy website. Authonomy is HarperCollins website where authors can test drive their manuscripts and get and give feedback. My partial manuscript was barely up before people started backing my book. Most would-be authors seem only too willing to back your book almost sight unseen as long as you will back theirs. “I LOVED your book” rings a little hollow under these circumstances. None-the-less, my motives for placing my book on this site are pure. It’s a free book, which anyone can read (you, too), which I hope inspires others to challenge the medical status quo when it comes to a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

I’ll post more information about how you can access it once I get the book fully uploaded . It still needs editing, but after five years and multiple edits, it’s time the gestation period came to an end.

MindFreedom Victory

VICTORY: MFI Alerts Help Win on Federal Agency’s Web Forum

It’s over. We won. Today, Friday, 22 October 2010, 5 pm EST was the deadline. And after the dust settled… After a last-minute campaign that temporarily pushed forced outpatient psychiatric drugging to the top of a USA forum about federal mental health goals… Enough of you ‘voted’ on the web to support the voice of mental health consumer/survivors… Challenge psychiatric drug industry undue power… And support more non-drug alternatives! [Update 9]

MindFreedom International News Update 9 – Friday, 22 Oct. 2010, 6:30 pm EDT

Half of 1.3 billion

I was speaking with a Chinese national the other day who  expressed great surprise when I told her how widely admired and emulated Traditional Chinese Medicine is. “Really? In China most people prefer medications,” she said. “Maybe 5% of Chinese go in for TCM.”

Well, 5% of the Chinese population is still a lot of people. China is a huge marketing opportunity, not just for manufacturers and raw materials, but for Western holistic practitioners and psychoanalysts. 

According to the Washington Post:

Chinese doctors – whose training has been limited to drug prescription – are hungry for new theories and techniques to treat patients. Meanwhile, Freudian psychoanalysts in the United States — often seen as outdated, even irrelevant – are equally keen to gain new ground in China. Connecting the two sides is Skype – an Internet video conferencing technology that didn’t even exist until seven years ago.

As long as I remained ignorant, he remained “seriously mentally ill”

Who is this person labelled the “seriously mentally ill?” The Alternative 2010 Conference that was held recently in California brought out a lot of commentary on all sides about this thing called serious mental illness.

My son was accepted by many excellent universities, one of them an Ivy League one. I mention this not to brag, but to make the following point. A scant two years later he would never be the “brilliant” student he once was, according to his doctors. They told me very sadly that he was seriously mentally ill and since he didn’t seem to be getting better, this was sort of it for him. I was to take him home and get used to the idea that his life (and ours) as we knew it was over.

I regret the time wasted not being told the truth about so-called mental illness. I look at Chris now, and I am always amazed at the intellectual calibre of the books he reads and the depth and breadth of his thinking processes. There’s no reason why he can’t excel at any university course he sets his mind to, should he so desire. I regret believing that there was no other option other than for my son to take the drugs we were told he needed to take so that his brain wouldn’t deteriorate any further than it presumably had. I regret that I didn’t know about alternatives. One reason I didn’t know about alternatives is precisely because NAMI, pharma, the psychiatric industry has been pushing the idea of serious mental illness on people like me. That’s their preserve. They exist because they insist that there is this special category of people.

Gradually it began to dimly dawn on me that maybe my husband and I had something to do with the state of mind my son was in. It should be at least part of the story, shouldn’t it? Surely there was something we could do or think that would help? Not when the mental health industry juggernaut gets involved. That kind of thinking is considered heresy and needs to be stamped out at every possible opportunity.

Chris remained seriously mentally ill while he was under the care of the psychiatric system and until I started to doubt the system. The psychiatrists we dealt supposedly believed in what they did, but obviously what they did was a failure. They didn’t admit to this. They turned thumbs down on my suggestions. They claimed that these are special cases who need their “help.” I don’t know what Dr. X was doing about serious mental illness, because whatever he was doing (the drugs, the therapy) wasn’t working. How could he possibly claim any legitimacy in this area and that he knew something that we didn’t? When Ian and I finally were forced to go behind his back to get Chris down to 25 mgs of clozapine, Dr. X. pleaded with us not to take it any lower because lower doses weren’t even therapeutic! I didn’t see anything therapetic happening at the higher doses or in the day program Chris attended, but this must somehow have escaped Dr. X, whose paycheck relied on the existence of serious mental illness.

They try to protect the “seriously mentally ill” through denying them their right to have their own voice, be it through medications or lowered expectations. Those who believe in the “seriously mentally ill” can’t seem to grasp that having the “seriously mentally ill” exist is a colossal failure of the parts of those who claim to be doing something about it. It is an indictment of medications, genetic links, psychiatry as practiced most everywhere today, and history. Thinking that there is something called serious mental illness says that people aren’t connecting cause with effect. Chances are when pressed, that people who do the labelling believe that there is bad brain biochemistry rather than bad environments.

I don’t believe in “the seriously mentally ill” but I do believe that they will continue to exist as long as the real problems of the so called seriously mentally ill go unnoticed by those who claim they are treating them. “Seriously mentally ill” was something that went away after I began pursuing serious understanding of what Chris was going through and why.

Rolfing

Many, if not most of the therapies that I write about on this blog, such as sound therapy and Tomatis, are not known in treating schizophrenia or other mental health issues. They are just therapies that I thought had a thread of logic regarding possible good outcomes for Chris, so I went for them. I’m glad that I did. All of the therapies that I write about in this blog have moved Chris forward in some way.

Today’s New York Times has an article about Rolfing, that New-Age seventies thing that was the butt of many jokes at the time. Rolfing is painful and can open up a flood of emotional memories, therefore, if introduced at all it might be good to wait until your relative is further along in the healing process.

As with other holistic practices, Rolfing seems to leave the door open for a certain mysticism. Even those who have little use for New Age-type practices like meditation can verge on the metaphysical when discussing Rolfing.

I don’t normally recommend things on my blog that I haven’t personally experienced, however, there are times when I do. There is a wide array of holistic products and practices that can help. Access to an Assemblage Point shift is out of the question for many due to the fact that there are so few practitioners. Tomatis is relatively expensive. There is no one pathway to healing, and I don’t want readers to get stuck in thinking that there is. As long as there is there appears to be no harm from the treatment, then what do we have to lose?

Random thoughts

Sometimes I tire of all the extremism in mental health. The doctors are one thing, some of the victims/patients/survivors are something else. It can be very hard to learn and progress with all the black and white thinking going on.

Daniel Paul Schreber’s wife. Now there was someone who sided with the doctor against her husband. Daniel Paul Schreber was the author of the wonderful “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.”   In his second hospitalization (1893 – 1902) he came under the care of Dr. Fleschig. His wife kept a framed photograph of Dr. Fleschig on her desk.

Today is World Mental Health Day. What are you doing about it? Here’s my suggestion. Send a letter or an e-mail to the editor of your local paper denouncing the widespread use and misuse of medications in treating patients. Say something nice about alternatives.