You have got it down pat. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Iam afraid this is a phase, this too shall pass I hope.
If you look at 20th century history psychiatrists were supposing the pseudo science of eugenics.Eugenics was taken as a serious science and there were departments of Eugenics. This is scientific darwinism- complete with separate departments within the faculty of medicine, people doing PHD’s , measuring skull sizes, jaw sizes etc. Basically it said that there should be scientific selection of the best genes , certain races were superior and the mentally ill should not reproduce. It started in UK, spread to the USA , but in Germany it spread like wildfire. The nazis used and carried out the pseudoscience of eugenics in their genocide and murdering hundreds of thousands of the mentally ill. As a consequence,after World war 2 , eugenics was no longer respectable and was never studied again.
I hope biological psychiatry-where people are forcibly given anti-psychotics for thinking differently, and antipsychotics dont work in any event, and where similar people in 3rd world countries who are NOT given antipsychotics’ prognosis is better – I do hope this methodical madness promoted by big pharmaceuticals , is recognised for what it is, sooner rather than later.

You are doing very good work on ADHD and asking the tough questions about mental health that no other politician is asking. $400 million could have been spent on aboriginal youth with far more utility and marginal benefits than the questionable EPPIC centres. Australian infant mortality is 5 per 1000, but among aborigines it is 15 per 1000. Many third world countries do better than 15 per 1000. Aborigine life span is about 18 years less than the rest of us, dying from easily preventable respiratory and other infections. Money to fund professorial fantasies must come from somewhere within the budget and it kills me to see money in such large proportions that could have been used for much good go to questionable projects like EPPIC and Headspace. After all, psychosis itself has no objective diagnosis so how can one even diagnose”pre-psychosis” with any degree of accuracy?

There is NO research at all to prove or even suggest that psychosis of a psychiatric kind is caused by some brain adnormality or the like. Any tests they do BEFORE a person is medicated will not show any differences at all between the brain of the individual with the psychosis and those without. Any changes that can be found can ONLY be found in those that are medicated and the more obvious changes are found in those that have been on the anti psychotics for longer and at higher doses. Yet they put it all down to the disease and not the medication. Yet we have no problems at all in prescribing these same medications to the elderly, children and the like, it shuts them up and numbs them out and so it means they simply lie in bed all day and do nothing. If we scan the brains of these people we would find the exact same changes in the brain as shown in those who have been daignosed as psychotic.

There are places like Western Lapland in Finland that are using specilised psychotherapy with people who are psychotic and achieving incredible outcomes and full CURE’s, that are still in place 15 years later. These people are going on to full time career’s, having children and having perfectly normal lifes as though nothing ever happened to them. What we have with medication is people able to live in supervised housing and be in supervised employment and have time in hospital every year or so.

The reality is that unless and until we are willing to offer people with any form of mental illness more than a pill then we are not going to do anything at all to help anyone. As for all the hype about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, a person’s profound and severe mental illness is more than some negative thoughts and a persons thoughts are based on their experiences and unless and until we are willing to put different experiences into their lives then nothing at all will change.

The work by Robert Whitaker says it all. There are programs out there that are having an amazing difference, they do not require court orders forcing people to take medications that the CIA in the US has been banned from using as torture agents as they are too inhumane, and yet they are supposedly perfectly fine to force onto innocent people, who simply happen to think slightly different to others.

There is no doubt that there are times when people can be a danger to themselves and perhaps other people, and it may mean that we need to keep them safe, but the question that has to be asked, is whether that gives us a right to force medication down someones throat, to put electricity in someones brain and the like. The reality is that non drug and non force alternatives do not experience voilence with people, in fact they have the absolute opposite. Treat people like human beings and they will respond as human beings.

There is and always will be a role for medication, but not as a first and only line of treatment. This is not about being anti psychaitry it is about being critical of psychiatry. And I am yet to know of anything at all about psychiatry that one can not be critical of. Above all else they need to start to tell the truth, and that is that they know nothing more today than they knew 50 years ago. That these medications cause more problems than they are worth and if they really were helpful then people would choose to take them. In relation to any form of medical treatment one has to weight up the beneifts with any limitations caused by the medications. If the medications were as brilliant as the pharacuetical companies make out then side effects would not be an issue, but when people are still depressed, still seeing strange things, still hearing voices and the like, and the medications are causing the most intolerable side effects possible, then why would any human being choose to take them. A diabetic feels better when they have insulin, an asthmatic feels better when they have ventolin, etc. Yet a person on these medications does not feel better when taking these medications in the vast majority of cases. Just becuase a person can no longer talk about the hallucinations and delusions does not mean they are not there. It is also important to recognise that any effect these drugs have in removing negative feelings, it also does in removing positive feelings. Imagine never being able to feel happy, joy, etc. as this is what these medications do.

http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/20/4/409
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis#Medical_conditions

There is no doubt that people do experience very real and very distressing psychotic experiences, but that is an individual interpretation and not something a psychiartist can decide. I do know people who had voices follow them everywhere and they were not nice voices. I do know another person who saw rabbits everywhere. Yet in each of those cases no amount of antipsychotics of any variety at all did anything at all to lessen the voices or visions, and I am yet to see any evidence that these medications actually have any “anti psychotic” properties in them. They are major tranqullisers and that is not bad. I do know people who say they dampened the voices and that helped. But the truth must be told.

There is also no doubt that people in third world countries who get no mental health treatment have more chance of recovering than people in developed countries. We have an epidemic of mental illness going out of proportion, and to then say that they are boilogical genetic conditions does not add up. Most of these medications cause infertility and those on them, are hardly reproducing off spring.

We also have the view that these medications keep people well, but again I am yet to see any evidence of that. The vast majority of people who are admitted to hospital are on community treatment orders and are being forcibly medicated via injections. Why are people being forcibly medicated if it is doing nothing for them??

Above all else I would love for someone to explain where all the funding for headspace goes. Not one cent of funding to headspace goes on direct client services, they are ALL funded by other sources, primarily medicare and the like. I also question how useful headspace is. A young person is not able to go there to do anything at all without being seen by a doctor first. I had huge issues when I was young and the local youth service helped me, when I was ready for help. I was able to go there and play pool and have a coffee and the like without any pressure at all. Yet that is no longer possible, most youth service funding is being moved to head space and while they usually have pool tables and youth workers and the like a young person cannot use them without seeing a doctor and being assessed first. We are telling young people experiencing normal life issues that they are ill with life long conditions, putting them on medications they do not need and not doing anything at all to encourage them to seek help and support. If we wanted early intervention for young people, then putting psychologists in schools, using already existing youth services and the like would be the way to go. But on instead we build new centres and tell young people that in order to go anywhere at all they have to have permission from a doctor. They have job search and education support there, but they have to have permission from a doctor to be able to use them!!