Are Psychiatric Medications Causing More Mental Illness?

Now it makes perfect sense to say, I went to sleep in my 40′s and awakened only to find that I had aged and am nearing 70. The side effects of psych drugs were horrendous at best. The drugs clouded my ability to think. It now appears they hampered my ability to remember those years as well. My suspicions about the drugs being the CAUSE and not a cure, thus ECT, is now validated. The drugs made it difficult to form new memories, while Electroshock destroyed much of what I had.

When I was being treated, I was given 17 different labels. Over 35 different drugs were prescribed, much of the time combined in “Drug Cocktails”. Since the side effects were so problematic and the ECT so destructive, the time came when I felt; I either have to get over this, or I have to get it over with (statement in medical record).

I am so thankful that God knew the end from the beginning and I am well today in spite of psychiatry!
Actually, it is quite comforting to read from the writings of Robert Whitaker. Thank you Sir!

I love the free sample site “123 Get Samples” search online to find their official website, that’s where i get most of my samples from!!! yay i love free stuff.

There are deep and unhealthy ties between the pharmaceutical industry and academic psychiatry. For example, I have heard that Dr. Nierenberg, who is debating Mr. Whitaker in this interview, receives or received support from Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Forest Laboratories, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen Pharmaceutica, Lichtwer Pharm, Pfizer, and Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories to name a few.

Can we really trust academic psychiatrists to faithfully serve two masters – both Truth and drug money?

I think Robert Whitaker’s thoughts about mental health treatment is mostly correct. It squares with my family’s experience, as one example. I also read his book. It is very clear, in any case, that psychiatrists breeze by any concerns about damage that these medications can cause, and make false promises about how effective the treatments will be – as if you will be all better when you take them.

I ran out of treatment options for bipolar disorder aftermore than 10 years, trying more than 20 medications alone and in combinations, at varying dosages, and ECT. I consulted several psychiatrists thru the years, some at prestigious hospitals. I was in the hospital every year, and fought suicide daily. I felt this intense need to claw my face off, or stab my chest open with scissors, for hours most every day. Finally, I gave up, decided to be nice to my husband for one year and go fishing with him a lot, then hang myself at the end of that year. I tapered off the medications because they didn’t help and they made me so cognitively impaired that I couldn’t control my behavior & made me verbally aggressive (my doc knew I was doing this).

I’ve been off meds for 9 months now, and I am functioning better than I have for many years (but not as well as I did before I took any meds), and my husband, therapist and social worker are very happy I am not taking pills. I get in few arguments anymore – I got my normal temperament back, like I was before meds. I’m still terribly depressed and not able to work a paid job, but I no longer feel the intense need to claw my face off. It appears that many psych drugs thru the years have caused this side effect (and a bunch of other horrible ones, like severe weight gain and violent nightmares etc). I’m thinking akathisia maybe.

My brother had different awful problems. He got disfiguring neurological problems, most likely from lithium – he barks like a dog, his body jerks, etc – tardive tourette’s disorder. The brain damage is permanent. Now he is terribly embarrassed in addition to coping with bipolar.

It turns out I was going to kill myself because of my pills’ horrible emotional and behavioral side effects. I couldn’t handle the internal grinding feeling, and the frequent arguments with my spouse were devastating. Both those problems are gone, now. Took about 3 months, I think.

I loved Robert Whitaker’s book, which I read a few months after I gave up on the pills. I have a math degree, so his analysis was very pleasing to me. Medical studies are designed very poorly and one university I went to offered FREE help from the math department so the medical dept. would do studies that weren’t so embarrassing. The math dept. had a statistics PhD student set aside just for this purpose and NOBODY took advantage of the free help. When I took statistics at a different university, medical studies were usually the examples we used of poor study design – flawed from the beginning.

Interestingly, I thought many of these meds were helping me, at least initially, but when I went back thru years of psychiatric records and put my mood cycles on a graph, it became clear to me that my moods cycle with the seasons and sunny/overcast weather, and my psychiatrist and I were giving credit to the medications when it was “normal” bipolar mood cycling. Anyone with fluctuating symptoms should chart them over time – you will never, ever figure it out otherwise. I think a lot of depressed people get fooled by their pills in this way, and when they get depressed again, they think the pill’s effect wore off, but it never worked to begin with.

Meads are not what they are cracked up to be. Most psych meds will make you paranoid and delusional. All makes for rich Dr and screwed up America.

In my case along with many others where horribly abused in a very religious surroundings. I grow up in an orphanage in Inglewood California that was ran buy conservative evangelical Baptist. It was during the height of the cold war. When every ones was up tight abut the treat of world inhalation. I was placed there by the States Child Protection Department because my father had died and my mother was not able to care for us 3 boys. The “childrens homes” called CBH only haired Evangelical types that had had children of there own. They supposedly screened to prevent any perverts or weirdoes. During the time I was there 1956 to 1962 from age 6 to just before my 13th Berth day. It was very stressful times for everyone in America and Europe with the constant nuclear threat. It may sound strange now days but everyone was preoccupied with building bomb shelters and on how to survive the impending nuclear holocaust. No one was concerned that some orphans weirs being physical or in some cases sexually abused. So all the so called normies that work there was taking out all there frustrations of the world by lining us up and slapping and hitting use kids very chance they got. It wasn’t just the 2 or 3 times a day that we where lined up that we where yield at and slapped around as hared as the 30 to 50 year old could slap us around. Any time your path crossed a staff person they would hall off and slap you across the face as hared as they could. But that was nothing compared to shower time when the House parents would reach their hand into your shower and tern the cold water completely off and the hot water on making you stand there burning in the hot water. They did in order so they could hit you as hared as they can with out leaving any bruises on there of 8 to 12 year old victims. Theses where daily currents for 7 years of my life. As bad as they where they where not as bad as my experiences with treatments for Post Traumatic Stress syndrome. The ETC destroyed me as a person and the medications gave me permanent tardeadiskonesea.

A wake-up call to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI):

The long-term use of psychiatric drugs impedes recovery, and causes disability. Period.

Friends don’t let friends join NAMI.

Duane Sherry, M.S.

In order to really understand how in the last 150 years this every growing ‘meds’ epidemic has continued into making BILLIONS of profits for the drug companies, and it being marketed (they spend millions on that. well…they can AFFORD to, right??) everywhere–you HAVE to research the philosophy behind it. You need to look at people/’thinkers’ from the past like Descartes, Wilhelm Wundt, Pavlov, etc—all contributing to a myth that animals and humans are machines.
So many ‘loving’ parents now are SO dumbed down by all this propaganda that they willingly take their child to one of these ‘experts’ like a consumer takes their car to a mechanic and asks if it can be fixed and how long?…! THATS where’we’ at! People here who are accepting the mental illness myth, please look into its history. You are being had—BIG TIME. It is all about social control, and PROFITS, and is maintained via propaganda. As soon as you become AWARE of this propaganda it will cease to have effect. You will see through it.
Now if you wonder what then could be solutions for all the various forms of psychosomatic distresses. Well understand that the pharma-psychiatrist cartel suppress alternative forms of help, and that their mechanistic model blames the person–believed to be a defective-machine, literally. So supporting them you continue this increasing oppression over all our and our CHILDRENS lives (we really REALLY owe it to our children to wake up to what is going on!). So this model blames the person, and this lets the system, the environment off the hook…..SEE? That is how it maintains itself. So take the ‘education’ system–that is usually taken for granted, but if you again checkout its history you will see it began as ENFORCED, and continues to be enforced. I ask you, is that natural? Yet you accept it as a given and will drug your children to accept it too. This is W R O N G. Please apply yourselves to research into all of this, that is all I encourage.
When we see the roots of the problems we then have more power to solve what needs solving.

My life was out of control. For seven years I was in and out of hospital(between 1965 and 1972) for a total of two years hospitalizations. Lithium put a ckeck on those breakdown although there was a price to pay: my kidney are not functioning well(I was pulled off of lithium in 1984). Tegretol replaced lithium. All that time I was maintained usually with two drugs(sometimes three). I was never on a cocktail of medication. The medication actually helped me. There are many people the medication doesn’t help. I am just lucky it does. I could not go on the way I was. It was too discouraging. I also saw a superb doctor for over ten years. It is not enough simply to take meds. Undestanding your situation takes a lifetime. And only some else can wealk you through it.

Psychiatric medicine and psychiatrists saved my psychotic son!

In his early thirties, and a married father of one, my younger brother was ‘diagnosed’ as ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ and hospitalised. At the psychiatric hospital in my presence (on a visit to see him) I witnessed an adverse reaction (incl twisted facial gestures and shaking body movements) that the poor guy had that evening to his cocktail of ‘medication’. The white-coated nurses apologised and reassured me that ‘he’d be OK’. My brother was discharged home soon afterwards with ‘support’ by occasional visits from a ‘community psychiatric nurse’ (CPN). My brother apparently (hearsay evidence at inquest from CPN) could not get along with this person who absented himself, did not advise his supervisors and left my brother to his own devices. Some weeks later he was found dead (hanged).

I tend to believe that psychiatry poisoned my brother, abandoned him, refused to advise his loving family of his situation and thus (as good as) killed him. We – his three brothers – visited the hospital and were seen for 10 minutes by the doctor/psychiatrist treating my brother. All that person could say was that ‘the taboo was broken’ and that we, his siblings, were all at risk of suicide, presumably. At the inquest several medical testimonies were accepted nem con: no discussion or cross-examination was permitted by the coroner.

Since then, over 20 years ago, I have achieved a PhD in the psychology school at an Irish university and now work as a psychotherapeutic consultant in suicidology. I welcome Robert Whitaker’s book. It is time to remove the financial shackles that inexorably bind psychiatry to the pharmacological industry making billions of dollars from the (mostly) unhealed misery of thousands of people, most of whom would be more compassionately and successfully cared for by psychotherapists expert in the humanistic therapies.

Psychopharmocology is a cheapskate sticking plaster that soaks up billions of dollars for vested interests. It may seem to temporarily may mask out the reality of clients’ agonising human pain of living but the psycho-medication industry and its supporters appear to have no objection to getting people as ‘hooked on drugs’ as any junkie. Time for humane doctors and nurses and all in the caring professions to wise up and learn how to heal people, including themselves, by ‘doing no harm’ through compassionate, empathic, therapeutic relationships.

Hello Friend, good day. Good post. You have obtained a new fan. Remember to maintain up the good work and I look forward to more of your great posts about Medical Supplies. Have a nice day!

It’s actually pretty obvious: Children need to learn impulse control. They don’t automatically have it. If you give drugs to a child who is hyper active these drugs will prevent that child from learning properly. (often times a simple change in diet could curb the hyper active tendencies anyway). Many children given drugs at such a young age develop nervous ticks and problems such as anxiety and depression. These are all known side effects and can persist long after the drugs have been removed from the system… that is assuming the children even survive. A child is now more likely to die from Psychiatric Drug overdose than to be kidnapped and murdered.

Robert Whitaker is correct about that these drugs make mental illness worse and increase the rate of disability.  I am one of the 4 million Americans on disability for mental illness.  Big Pharma and Psychiatry will deny this because the drugs are their main source of profit.