Peter Breggin on the hazards of psychiatric diagnosis

I’ve extracted three key points from Dr. Peter Breggin’s Huffington Post blog. on the hazards of psychiatric diagnoses. Each one, except for “medication spellbinding” as Breggin terms it, speaks to my own experience. And the reason that medication spellbinding doesn’t apply in my son’s and my experience is because I sensed that the medication fairy dust fell on the psychiatrists’ prescribing the drugs. They attributed all kinds of benefits to things I didn’t see at all. Their judgement was impaired, not mine, but that, of course, was a no win point of view for me, because I had already ceded power and authority into the hands of health professionals. On Breggin’s third key point below, try as I may to get people to look deep inside their own lives in order to heal their relative, many people just assume that I’m just a mother basher who is determined to push psychiatry back to the bad old days.

Psychiatric diagnoses take power and authority over your life, and the lives of your children, out of your hands. They place that power and authority in the hands of health professionals. Often it takes but a few minutes in an office to transform you or your child from a complex human being into a product on the psychiatric assembly line–and endless assembly line that can lead to a ruinous lifetime.

Perhaps worst of all, these diagnoses almost inevitably lead to the prescription of psychiatric medication to you or your child. Psychiatric drugs are toxins to the brain; they work by disabling the brain. None of them cure biochemical imbalances and all of them, every single one of them, cause severe biochemical imbalances in the brain. The adverse effects of these drugs on the brain and mind are stunning. In my recent scientific books and articles, including Medication Madness, I have demonstrated they cause medication spellbinding. Spellbound by psychoactive drugs we cannot adequately judge the impairments they create in our brain and too often we mistakenly feel “improved” when in fact our feelings have been dulled or artificially jacked up, and our judgment about ourselves and our lives have been impaired.

But something more subtle occurs when we accept a psychiatric diagnosis for ourselves or a loved one. We lose empathy for ourselves and our loved one. Instead of learning about and identifying with the sources of our emotional pain and suffering, and our failures in life, we ignore our real lives and explain ourselves away with the diagnosis. To understand ourselves or anyone else, to help ourselves or anyone else, we must care about the details of the life before us.
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Misunderstood and then misdiagnosed

I do most of my thinking for this blog while I’m walking to and from work. The motion and fresh air stimulate my thoughts. As I walk, I ruminate about something I heard or saw the day before.

 The bipolar disorder satire that has been seen on so many blogs, the one where the computer animated woman keeps telling the shrink how crummy she feels on the medication and he keeps repeating that she needs the medication because she has “the bipolar disorder,” and it goes round and round from there. She tells him that she was feeling very upset because of a family tragedy when she was admitted to hospital and he says “that’s the bipolar disorder.”

What interested me recently about this clip was that the patient says she is on 10 mg of Abilify for “the bipolar disorder.” A few months ago I half jokingly told Chris (on 5 mg Abilify) he was depressed, not schizophrenic, because I discovered that Abilify was now being prescribed as an add-on treatment for depression. But he can also be bipolar, if that’s what he prefers, because Abilify is also for bipolar disorder. (A real wonder drug!) Who’s to say Chris isn’t bipolar? When he was first admitted to hospital, the doctors gave him only a 25% chance of being bipolar, but, as we know, doctors are often wrong, especially when it comes to psychiatric diagnoses.

Of course, I am being facetious, because the labelling is meaningless in the first place, but the blurring of diagnoses logically comes about because the same drug is used to treat supposedly different conditions. This is an open invitation to pick the diagnosis you would prefer to have. If a choice has to be made, wouldn’t a patient want to join the higher status group of people like Britney, Catherine and Mel, who supposedly don’t have schizophrenia, they have “the bipolar disorder.” Is it logical to claim that if you are no longer on Abilify, you no longer have the bipolar disorder/schizophrenia/depression?

Along the same lines of my muddled thinking on Abilify, here is an excerpt from Pamela Spiro Wagner’s blog, which relates how her friend  assumed that he was schizophrenic, based solely on the fact that he was prescribed Trilafon. The doctors never questioned this diagnosis once Joe told them what he was. They accepted what Joe told them as fact, without doing their own thinking. This is a very sad story, and unfortunately, it’s an all too frequent one.

I believe that Joe was misdiagnosed for many many years with schizophrenia, when in fact he had had Asperger’s from childhood. Now, that’s a long story in itself and though I could make a case for it, I cannot prove it. But I am not the only one who knew him well to notice that he never once exhibited signs of psychosis or even real delusions or true paranoia. Furthermore, from what I gather, the only reason the diagnosis came about or “took” was because he was put on Trilafon by a well-known psychiatric incompetent who was later “defrocked” and when Joe looked the drug up in the PDR and read what it was used for, he concluded that that meant he must have schizophrenia. From then on, so his story was, he told subsequent doctors this diagnosis, and apparently they simply took it on faith. In fact, for all the years thereafter until his terminal illness of ALS, the one doctor he saw not only never questioned this, but also never even reconsidered his absurd concomitant Dx as bipolar, even though Joe clearly had one of the most placid temperament possible and certainly wasn’t the slightest bit moody. No one so far as I know ever even considered that there might be something else going on. Even when I once went with him to see his non-medical therapist, did she really seem even to want to think about the possibility, as if it might be too much trouble…Perhaps, though I cannot recall, it was too late, if in fact this was after Joe’s ALS diagnosis.

But as I said, that is a long story, and not being a doctor, I suppose I can’t make the diagnosis, except that as his closest friend, I do and I feel that a great injustice was done. Not only was he saddled with a serious psychiatric diagnosis, and a stigmatizing one at that, but that particular neuroleptic medication rendered him much too tired to work as an engineer. All his adult life that was what he really wanted to do. Work. But the drug sapped his stamina…Worst of all, although eventually on Zyprexa which helped what might have been poor social skills due to Asperger’s, after he had been on it for years it caused the diabetes that ultimately cost him his life.

So what is schizophrenia? I’ll let Jung have the last word here. These are actually two quotes. I have added the second shorter quote to show how to cure a schizophrenic. (I like how he adds “provided one’s own constitution holds out.” How true!)

But even so one can bring about noticeable improvements in severe schizophrenics, and even cure them, by psychological treatment, provided that one’s own constitution holds out [in my own experience, I have had situations where I continued the long-term psychotherapy of several patients in inpatient state hospital settings, later transferred into my practice, in which I was physically attacked, reported to have sexually molested the patient , etc, to very positive outcomes, e.g., to the point where family thought their family member was originally misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, never having to return to the state hospital after many years of residing there, etc]. This question is very much to the point, because the treatment not only demands uncommon efforts but may also induce psychic infections in a therapist who himself has a rather unstable disposition. I have seen no less than three cases of induced psychoses in treatments of this kind.

A schizophrenic is no longer schizophrenic… when he feels understood by someone else.

– Carl Jung