Coming Out Crazy archive
May 21, 2008
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Sandy Naiman
May 21, 2008
It all depends on how you look at mental health.
Can your mind become ill, like other organs in your body? Or are what we consider mental illnesses not illnesses at all, but differences within the human spectrum of experience—just more “extreme mental states?”
In other words, are some people just “too” different for our society?
Consider a study conducted by the World Health Organization in 1979 comparing the outcomes of people with schizophrenia in developed versus developing countries.
In the developing countries, mainly in Africa, the recovery rate of people with schizophrenia proved to be twice as high as in developed countries—U.S., England and Europe.
The WHO couldn’t believe their results. Scratching their heads with no explanation, in 1991, they repeated the same study. Same results. Still no clinical explanation was cited. Just speculation.
Don’t believe it? Well, fast forward to 2008. Seattle-based mental health journalist Philip Dawdy, who has bipolar disorder and fervently and fastidiously monitors the shenanigans of Big Pharma on his award winning blog “Furious Seasons,” discussed a small study today published last year in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
Two University of Illinois psychiatrists found that "patients with schizophrenia who had removed themselves or been removed from antipsychotic medications showed significantly better global functioning and outcome than those still being treated with antipsychotics.”
Don’t try this! The study followed these people for 15 years after diagnosis, was relatively small and they were carefully monitored.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe what we consider to be mental illnesses may not be illnesses at all. Maybe they’re temporary or evolutionary states. Maybe they aren’t best “treated” by “scientific” and “medical” means.
Maybe we should be asking more questions. Be more critical.
What is normal? Is there a “normal”? Who decides? Are they normal?
Are mental illnesses psychiatric disorders or diseases that can only treated with traditional psychiatric treatments—drugs and psychotherapy?
How well are drugs and psychotherapy working? Mental health issues aren’t going away. They’re on the rise.
If there are alternatives to mainstream medical approaches to mental health issues, how alternative?
Over the next two weeks, a mind blowing array of global experts will descend on Toronto to explore and share a vastly diverse array of “alternative” ideas, research, knowledge and experiences to the traditional, mainstream medical approach of dealing with mental health and mental illnesses.
At the First International Conference on Integrative, Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Mental Health at the Sheraton Hotel this weekend, North American “medical” specialists will discuss treating mental illnesses with acupuncture, naturopathy, Ayurveda, nutrition, Native American healing, chiropractics, homeopathy, aromatherapy, spirituality and other methods.
This conference is for doctors, health professionals and students, but I’ll be there.
Then, on Thursday, June 5 and Friday, June 6 at the University of Toronto’s Hart House, the International Network toward Alternatives and Recovery (INTAR) and the Leadership Project of Toronto are presenting International Recovery Perspectives: “Action on Alternatives.”
For more information on registering for this conference, contact Brian McKinnon at bmckinnon@iprimus.ca or (416) 285-7996, ext. 227.
And stay tuned. Later this week, I’ll tell you more about this critical and creative exploration of leading edge approaches to Mental Health Recovery.
May 16, 2008
Let's talk about "Mad Pride."
Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a front page story in the “Style” section of all places, headlined “Mad Pride fights stigma.” (I wish the editors had used the word “prejudice” instead, but that’s another story.)
It focused on two women with mental illnesses who are living out loud.
Philadelphia Weekly writer Liz Spikol muses about her bipolar disorder in forthright, often disquieting YouTube posts, and in her blog and newspaper column about mental health.
Elyn Saks, University of Southern California law professor and associate dean, speaks out candidly about her lifelong struggle with schizophrenia in lectures and in her new memoir, “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.”
This is nothing new.
In March 2007, the Toronto Star’s Helen Henderson wrote a feature about “Mad Pride,” the first in a mainstream North American newspaper, although she didn’t use that term. Mental health advocates and activists all over the continent, and globally in cyberspace trumpeted her column. Even the Poynter Institute, the preeminent St. Petersburg, Florida school for journalists and journalism teachers recognized Henderson’s breakthrough story.
“Mad Pride” is all about human rights like the Gay Pride, Black Pride and Women’s Lib movements. Its roots date back to the 1960s psychiatric and consumer survivors, whose anger and activism stewed underground, known, but largely ignored by the mainstream media.
In London, England, media campaigns to counteract the slurs of the tabloid press emerged in the late 1990s. Activists began reclaiming the word “mad” in the same way gay rights activists have reclaimed the word, “queer”––to celebrate our identity, fight prejudice and discrimination, and declare our rights to visibility, acceptance and respect.
Mad People’s History courses are offered at York and Ryerson Universities and at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education.
Mad Students’ Societies on university and college campuses all over the continent are empowering young people and breaking down barriers to education.
For many years, "Mad Pride" has been celebrated internationally on July 14. (Bastille Day, too, which celebrates the beginning of the French Revolution.)
Last year, Mayor David Miller officially proclaimed July14th Mad Pride Day in Toronto, which was marked by our first official “Bed Push.”
This event was inspired by British psychiatric survivors, consumers and mad folks who staged the first-ever “Great Escape Bed Push” in 2006.
Pyjama-clad, they pushed a psychiatric bed from Millview Psychiatric Hospital in Brighton, 96 kilometres to the original sight of “Bedlam,” the Bethlem Asylum in London, while being pursued by a giant syringe.
All to raise awareness of the history of maltreatment of people diagnosed with mental illnesses and the increasing force of the psychiatric establishment.
This year, Monday, July 14 to Saturday, July 20 is Mad Pride Week in Toronto. Each day will feature different activities –– an arts festival, a tour of the patient-built wall at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (formerly the Toronto Lunatic Asylum), a Mad Pride Poetry Jam and the second annual Toronto Mad Pride Bed Push Parade and Party.
At last, all over the world, we’re coming out. Hear our voices. We won’t be silenced, ever again.
May 13, 2008A letter arrived recently. It rattled me. Got me thinking about a couple of things. So let’s just call this post a “crazy quilt.” A riff of random thoughts on “peeling the onion.” My psychiatrist’s metaphor for psychotherapy.
You realize that peeling onions makes you cry.
Psychotherapy isn’t easy. It isn’t fun. It isn’t self-indulgent. It isn’t “mindless navel-gazing,” as one fellow, I know, calls it. He’s dead wrong.
Sometimes it’s painful, frustrating. Even frightening. Ultimately, it’s enlightening. I’ve had more “ah-ha” moments in therapy than anywhere else.
Good psychotherapy is not just talking and remembering, it’s grounding your experiences and memories in meaning. You may not like what you learn.
Often it’s easier to let those memories sift back into your unconscious. Deny their existence. Except they tend to bang around back there and eventually make trouble.
“When I was in my 20’s, I used to wish I could have a lobotomy,” a woman wrote. “It would have been so wonderful to start all over again without the memories and demons from an extremely abusive upbringing.”
Despite a history of emotional and mental distress, she lives an apparently enviable life. Now she’s approaching 60. Behind a semblance of success, her exceptional career, her admiring friends and colleagues, secretly, she’s tortured—especially since her psychiatrist died.
“I thought I could eke out a living on my own, but the shadow cast by my past is getting so long, I can see it ahead of me,” she admitted.
So she’s looking for another psychotherapist.
It’s time to peel off another layer.
What grit and courage, this woman has. She’s not going back, but onward and inward.
Dr. Bob confided recently that on quite a few occasions, he’s seen “patients”—his word—who insist on being given a diagnosis and a prescription. They have no interest in psychotherapy.
“They come once or twice, but when they don’t get what they want, they never come back,” he said.
They want quick fixes.
An emotional trauma can’t be bandaged like a sliced finger or cast in plaster like a broken leg. You can’t see your mind healing. It isn’t a linear experience. Those layers don’t always peel off easily.
It hurts and heals at the same time. Rebuilds spirit and soul, from the inside out. You have to be ready.
You don’t always need a psychotherapist.
Hairdressers can be great psychotherapists. Have you noticed? You can talk to them as they transform you. Listening, they make you feel good.
That’s often what psychotherapy is.
Whatever works for you.
There are many ways to peel the onion.
May 8, 2008
Two weeks a year are devoted to Mental Health Awareness. This week, at the beginning of May. And another week, at the beginning of October.
Two weeks a year are not enough.
With six million American and who knows how many Canadian children –– as young as three years old –– prescribed cocktails of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs never intended for children, tested in children or proven effective in children –– two weeks are not enough.
With more antidepressants sold than all other prescription drugs combined –– two weeks are not enough.
Who says we’re supposed to be happy all the time? What happened to waking up on the wrong side of the bed? What happened to situational sadness? What’s wrong with “a bad mood” or “feeling blaaah” or being blue? Moods swing. If they didn’t, we’d be robots. Stepford people. We sure wouldn’t be human.
When we’ve medicalized our moods away by numbing our minds to life’s big and little tensions, pressures, strains and stresses with prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs, even food –– two weeks are not enough.
Today’s array of antidepressants are effective most often only in cases of severe, extreme and persistent depression. Deep, dead dog dark depression that hits hard and doesn’t let go. That lays you out flat. For no apparent reason.
Even in these cases, powerful neuroleptics are only one approach. Temporary tools. They have side effects, too.
There are alternatives.
Despite what your medical doctor or psychiatrist tells you, any so-called “chemical imbalance in your brain” is not necessarily the cause of depression or any mental illness. That is just the latest, most enduring psychiatric theory. It hasn’t been proven.
And the drug companies, Big Pharma, are laughing all the way to the bank.
Earlier this week, The New York Times “Well” Blog reported that according to the consumer watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), more than half of the 28 new writers currently working on the forthcoming edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses (D.S.M.) are linked to the drug industry.
This psychiatric Bible, to be published in 2012, is the handbook used to make diagnoses of mental illnesses, a highly subjective, by-no-means scientific process.
These “editors” annual income cannot exceed more than $10,000 per year from industry sources. One member, over the last five years consulted for 13 different drug companies, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Wyeth, Merck, AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb, reported CSPI’s Integrity in Science project.
“We have made every effort to ensure that D.S.M.-V will be based on the best and latest scientific research, and to eliminate conflicts of interest in its development,” said APA president Dr. Carolyn B. Rabinowitz, in a press release.
You know what? This isn’t even new. Similar hazardous links between D.S.M. writers and the drug industry dating back to 1989 were reported in 2006.
Two weeks a year for Mental Health Awareness?
Nope. Just not enough.
May 6, 2008
Here, at the “Coming Out Crazy” cranny, I promised you that we would “talk.” I haven’t forgotten.
We’re not yet “interactive” –– I’m told that’s coming –– but in the meantime, in this post, and the next one, too, I’ll share some of your comments, answer a few questions and even let you rant a bit.
I’m in a great mood, thanks to you. You’ve been so supportive, enthusiastic and encouraging about “Coming Out Crazy.” Sharing ideas, concerns, comments and kudos.
Surprisingly, not a word of criticism. Yet. I live in hope. :–)
A young man from Toronto, studying in Budapest, writes: “I too have suffered a mood disorder for most of my life, and through psychotherapy I have best been able to manage depression. It was mostly therapy conducted on myself, through the book “Feeling Good” by David Burns, recommended to me by a therapist.
“I would love to read in future articles about particular insights or psychotherapeutic approaches that have helped you to manage your disorder.”
For a couple of years, I worked with two social workers –– family therapists. Amazing experience. The Family Therapy model is non-psychiatric. My therapists used some Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Great for specific problem solving. They recommended “The Family Crucible” by Augustus Napier and Carl Whitaker. Remarkably insightful if you’re working on family dynamics.
My post on medicating children touched a nerve. This mother of a four-year-old girl labelled with ADD, childhood bipolar disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and reactive attachment disorder, writes: “In our family, we use diagnoses as a tool to understanding different aspects of our daughter's experience.
“We avoid treating any of the frameworks provided by a diagnosis as definitive. The danger in diagnosis is that it is inherently "medicalized" and parents and professionals are then lured into treating the "illness" as though it is separate from all other context.
“In the case of young kids, mental health issues cannot be separated from other aspects of social, emotional, and cognitive development. The entire foundation for infant mental health is the parent-child relationship. So handing over our kids to therapists and doctors is entirely counterproductive.
“I am not saying that professional help is not needed. Our family needs and uses mental health services and professionals. But our focus is getting the tools and support we need as parents to create a healing family context – a context that allows my daughter to thrive even though her development is atypical. This is not easy.”
You are so courageous. You’re preparing your daughter for a healthy future. And recovery. With young children, the parent-child relationship is the key to healing. Not pills.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom and extraordinary values.
One footnote: I’m amazed at the labels doctors have assigned your daughter. Since we’ve been discussing books, I urge you to read Harvard psychologist Paula J. Caplan’s “They Say You’re Crazy –– How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal.”
I’ve known Paula for years. She’s brilliant. Taught in Toronto at OISE before returning to Harvard. She’s written many books on mental health and her perspectives will put an enlightening spin on psychiatric labelling and bolster your confidence.
You’re doing everything right for your child. I applaud you!
April 29, 2008
One evening about eight years ago, I decided I wanted to be a Sunshine Girl.
At 50 and five-foot-one, with some good air brushing, anything’s possible.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if The Sun’s token feminist popped up on Page Three, as the cheesecake symbol enraging so many women and titillating so many men?
I’d bridge the gender gap.
I got on the phone and called The Toronto Sun photo-editor and brokered my brilliant idea to him. Then, to Sun Media’s vice-president. I tracked down The Sun’s publisher on vacation. Finally, The Sunday Sun editor silenced me.
He wisely advised me to stop phoning people and take a few days off.
If anyone asked me–– no one did–– my eccentric behaviour made perfect sense.
People do strange things when they fall in love. The first time. Call it extreme infatuation.
Why? The object of my affections really existed. I wasn’t hallucinating. And he was in love with me, too. He saw no reason why I couldn’t be a Sunshine Girl. Maybe he was hallucinating.
Love is potent. So, yeah, I was a little high. You would be, too.
Dr. Bob had put me on a “drug holiday” for nine months. It hadn’t made any difference, until then.
Now, he wanted me in hospital and back on my mood stabilizer. It affects all my kidney drugs, so in hospital, my blood work could conveniently be done every morning at 6 a.m.
Infatuation is intoxicating. A great sleep thief. I hadn’t been sleeping. At all. Without sleep, getting a little high–– read manic–– is perfectly normal for me.
In his book, Solitude, the late British psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes about the necessity of sleep.
We spend a third of our lives asleep. Our brains need sleep. Depriving prisoners of sleep is a quick way to break them down. After a few days without sleep, the most “normal” of people begin exhibiting psychotic symptoms–– hallucinations and delusions.
Here is Storr’s most intriguing statement.
“It is also worth noting that many episodes of mental illness are preceded by periods of insomnia.”
Where’s the line between normalcy and insanity if the cause of hallucinations, delusions and other psychotic symptoms is the same–– sleeplessness?
Recently, I met a young woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She knows there is severe emotional trauma in her background. Sexual abuse. She’s blocked it from her memory. Good thing.
As 18, she was hospitalized after only one psychotic episode, triggered by sleeplessness. Prescribed Lithium and Tegretol, two mood stabilizers.
After a few weeks, she stopped taking them. Never told anyone. She was fine. Went on to finish university, marry, have a child and now she works in the mental health sector.
Ten years later, she tracked down her psychiatrist to tell her how well she was, without medication.
“You have a serious mental illness and must take those drugs as a preventive measure,” her former doctor sternly warned. This woman was shocked.
Once diagnosed, never undiagnosed. Psychiatric labels stick.
Maybe. It’s possible, isn’t it? Labels and the labelers can be wrong.
April 25, 2008
I’m reading a vision statement from the Mental Health Commission of New Zealand called Te Hononga 2015, Connecting for greater well-being.
I’m drooling.
In Maori, “Te Hononga” means to be connected, physically, socially and spiritually.
It’s Utopian. Why isn’t Canada striving for this?
What lessons we could learn.
Here’s one small snippet from the chapter on values in Te Hononga, written by Sarah Porter, one of many New Zealanders who contributed their personal perspectives. She was diagnosed and treated for a mental illness from the age of nine and has more than 30 years of experience of recovery. She’s worked in the community mental health sector since 1992.
“The idea of mental illness being a disease will give way to a more holistic view of mental distress being a normal part of the human experience. This change will enable people to better understand and support people in their communities. Huge progress made at the beginning of this century means we have learned that the key characteristics of recovery are hope, a sense of belonging, self-determination and a sense of meaning and purpose.”
Mental distress instead of mental illness as normal part of human experience.
Recovery.
This isn’t just semantics. These ideas represent a major paradigm shift in the way mental health is perceived and people are treated.
Why don’t we hear more about recovery and mental health in this country?
What does recovery mean?
There is no rigid definition. The American approach differs from New Zealand’s approach. Recovery is a personal experience. It can be a journey that lasts a lifetime, or a single epiphany. But in New Zealand, social context and societal responsibility are crucial for recovery.
One woman, Mary O’Hagan, is the powerhouse behind New Zealand’s enlightened approach to mental health.
In the 1970s, in her late teens, she was diagnosed and hospitalized for a mental illness. Humiliated and disturbed by the insensitive, patriarchal treatment she received at the hands of her psychiatrists, she started working and agitating for a new humanitarian approach to mental health care.
She rallied others with “lived experience” of mental illnesses and started New Zealand’s first “service user” group. They’re changing that society’s cultural view of mental health.
In 1998, O’Hagan introduced the landmark Blueprint for Mental Health Services, which mentioned “recovery” in a central government agency document for the first time.
It stresses the importance of hope. Living well in the presence or absence of one's mental illness. And personal and social responsibility. Everyone –– families, communities and people with mental health problems –– must actively participate in the recovery process.
Discrimination is the biggest barrier to recovery.
Recovery is bubbling under the surface here. Ontario’s “Making It Happen” implementation plan for mental health reform mentions “recovery.” Is this just lip service?
Do mental health professionals give out hope with all their diagnoses and prescriptions?
Why isn’t our new Mental Health Commission enshrining recovery principles in a national mental health care action plan? This week, they announced a public forum in Vancouver about its four-year study of homelessness and mental illnesses. This is just one small part of the picture. We need an inclusive approach for everyone in mental distress.
Canada lags light-years behind other countries. It’s time we caught up.
April 21, 2008
Words matter. Language is powerful. It shapes what we think and how we perceive.
“Seeing is believing,” as the saying goes, but it’s quite the opposite.
Believing is seeing.
What you believe is what you see. What you believe is your reality. With education, your belief system changes. Change your beliefs and the world becomes a different place.
Yet with mental health, our language is often misleading and toxic, inadvertently spreading misinformation.
I hate the word “stigma.” Every time I see it, I cringe. It’s imbued with negativity going back centuries to Biblical times and it’s used almost exclusively in relation to people with mental illnesses.
Linguistically, it’s a “praeteritio,” a negated negative. A rhetorical figure of speech. A writer or speaker invokes a subject by denying this subject should be invoked.
Here’s how our language can work on our minds.
Let’s say I ask you to think of a “short-necked pink giraffe.” You’ll immediately try to imagine a short-necked pink giraffe. You may even succeed in conjuring up such a creature in your mind –– though no such animal exists.
Now, here’s this same process. Different context.
In the 1950 California Senate race, Republican candidate Richard Nixon faced down New Deal Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas in a debate. He stated: “I do not say my opponent is a Communist. I do not say that at all.”
That statement planted in the minds of the American public the notion that Gahagan Douglas was indeed a Communist, though she was the opposite. It effectively scotched her political career.
That was a negated negative. A subversive ad hominem attack. A device Nixon used to distance himself from his unfair claims while still bringing them up.
The word “stigma” works the same way. Subversively. It’s an ugly old word, with an uglier meaning.
By definition, a stigma is a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality or person.
In medicine, although the term is no longer used, it is a visible sign or characteristic of a disease.
It originated from the Greek “stigma” as in a “mark made by a pointed instrument, a dot,” related to a stick.
In ancient Greece, slaves or criminals were literally branded with hot pokers to be made visible to the general public.
Today, using the word “stigma” automatically and unfairly victimizes people with psychiatric conditions, branding them with dishonour and shame. There’s the negated negative.
Yet people with mental illnesses don’t have the stigma. Society does.
Society has been branded by its own ignorance and fear.
Today, thousands of people with mental illnesses function fully in our society, actively engaging and making valuable contributions.
What if educational institutions, governments and the media stopped using the word “stigma”?
Why not call it like it is? “Prejudice” and “discrimination.” That’s what stigma really is and that can be addressed.
It’s about time.
Instead of mounting “anti-stigma” campaigns, start “education campaigns.”
Every time you see or hear the word “stigma,” it reinforces the negative, outmoded message that people who have experienced altered states of mind, emotional traumas, and psychiatric labelling should be “marginalized,” “branded” and “feared.”
This is inhumane. Unfair. Cruel.
Stop using the word “stigma.” Change the language. And beliefs will change.
The word “stigma” is like a “short-necked pink giraffe.” It’s imagined. It’s mythology.
And it’s damaging our public discourse on mental health that’s desperately in need of healing.
April 17, 2008
You’ll begin to notice a theme in these posts.
I’m very wary of pill-pushers in matters of the mind.
In January 1991, during Desert Storm, I almost died of acute iatrogenic end-stage kidney failure in the Emergency Room of Women’s College Hospital.
The cause? Lithium toxicity.
“Iatrogenic” means treatment-caused. My lithium levels weren’t monitored carefully enough. My case was rare, but not unheard of.
The Lithium Carbonate I took for close to 16 years to treat my manic depression permanently damaged my only kidney. It seems I was born with just one.
There was no going back. I would never get better. Just worse. Sicker. Until I had to go on dialysis. For two years.
On March 7, 1994, I had a kidney transplant. My sister Glorianne gave me one of her kidneys and saved my life. Now we both have just one.
Ever since, I’ve taken mouthfuls of pills every day.
The longer I have my transplanted kidney, the more pills I need to ensure my body doesn’t reject it, and for other complex reasons.
Once a week I inject myself with EPO because I’m chronically anaemic. You'd better believe that all these drugs have their side-effects.
Back in the 1970s, Lithium Carbonate was hailed as a psychiatric revolution –– the first drug to treat the mental illness, not just the symptoms.
It would supercede psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Imagine.
Sigmund Freud was thrown into the dumpster.
It was quite the fad.
Choreographer Joshua Logan took it and swore by it.
It hit big after TIME magazine published an article titled “Maude’s Mania” on February 9, 1976.
It discussed how the temperamental diva in that popular sitcom was going to take Lithium, “the first wonder drug of psychiatry.”
Why?
Norman Lear, the show’s creator-producer, witnessed firsthand the results in one of his relatives on the drug.
My shrinks compared my mental illness to diabetes. A common analogy.
Both are chronic conditions. Both can be managed with medication.
Manic depression with Lithium. Diabetes with insulin.
It's really bad analogy, but I bought it. What did I know in 1975? What did anyone know?
Even the shrinks.
Lithium robbed me of my health. And it didn't even work for me.
Back then, it was prescribed in doses five times higher than today. I was a guinea pig. And it was the only game in town.
Now, psychopharmacologists know more. Lithium may be helping you. If not, there are other mood stabilizers that might. With fewer side effects.
The point is, find the right drug for you.
I found mine. Tegretol. It's very innocent, for me. After I started taking it in 1988, I never had another major manic episode.
I never stopped my psychotherapy, either.
Drug therapy should be one part of a mental health strategy that must include good “talk therapy.”
If your psychiatrist won’t help you, find someone who will.
A psychologist. Social worker. Consider group therapy. Peer support. Find a community mental health centre. There’s help out there, but you have to find it.
And start talking.
Mental illnesses are emotionally traumatic. Drugs are tools. Talking heals.
I’m not advocating that you make a decision in isolation to go off your Lithium. That's never advisable. Adjustments should always be medically supervised.
But you can see why I’m skeptical about drugs for the mind and psychiatry by prescription.
April 15, 2008
Sometimes I think the whole world is crazy.
Last week was one of them.
PBS repeated its disturbing documentary, The Medicated Child, about six million American children taking psychiatric drugs that have never been tested on children.
Russian roulette, one expert called it.
The next morning, front-page headlines reported a new University of Manitoba study suggesting a rise in teenage suicides may be linked to a health warning alerting doctors to the potential risks of prescribing antidepressants to children and adolescents.
Did this warning stop them from taking their meds and seeing their doctors for treatment for depression? Not clear.
Was this treatment psychotherapy? Who knows?
The results were vague and raised more questions than answers.
I'm no expert, but I do know that all psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants and antipsychotics, affect people differently.
The only way to know is by trying them. Like guinea pigs.
These days, it's not uncommon for children to be prescribed cocktails of drugs meant for adults.
Drugs that affect children differently than adults.
Drugs interacting with drugs on young, developing brains.
One more thing. This is going to sound heretical. The medical establishment isnt going to like it. Or the drug companies. But it's true.
Since the 1970s, psychiatrists have asserted that mental illnesses are caused by neurological dysfunctioning chemical imbalances in the brain treatable by drugs that target neuroreceptors.
This widely held assumption has not yet been proven. Its still theory.
And it excludes context.
Why would parents hand over responsibility for their children's emotional well-being to doctors who seem to have only one tool in their tool box?
Drugs.
This is terribly complex. Today's depressed, often sleep-deprived teens can be emotionally traumatized. Divorcing parents. School issues. Peer pressures. Hopscotching hormones. Social problems. Uncertainty about the future.
Adolescence has never been a picnic.
What about environmental toxins, excessive television and other technologies, modern agricultural effects on the contents of food nutrients.
There's also a terrible inequity in Canada's healthcare system.
You need a medical doctor to give you a diagnosis to get coverage for an emotional problem.
Your healthy-but-unhappy child could use some good old fashioned talking therapy. Support. Peer support. Help that takes into account all the context most psychiatrists ignore.
Where to find it? All you hit are endless waiting lists.
Psychologists, social workers, trained psychotherapists fit the bill, but they aren't covered by provincial health insurance.
Meanwhile, your kid is really worrying you, so off you trot to your GP.
Before you know it, your healthy-but-unhappy child is labeled with the diagnosis du jour, bipolar disorder, and handed a prescription. Fast and easy.
There are other approaches.
Like Parents for Youth.
In 2001, my husband and I were settling into our new marriage with his 13-year-old daughter.
Volatile times.
Dr. Bob suggested we contact child psychiatrist Harvey Armstrong who works with parents of difficult children.
Armstrong facilitates groups of parents who learn from each others experiences how to parent more effectively.
Sometimes its tough, but it works.
After a year of weekly 90-minute sessions with ten other parents, we left our group with pocketsful of skills and strategies.
Today we have a much happier, harmonious household, and a fantastic kid.
April 11, 2008
In 1975, my psychiatrists had a “Eureka” moment. They decided I no longer had schizophrenia.
This was enouraging. That year, I was planning to apply to Ryerson’s School of Journalism.
Imagine a reporting student with “a psychosis marked by withdrawn, bizarre and sometimes delusional behaviour, and by intellectual and emotional deterioration, also called dementia praecox.”
That’s how my 1966 edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, defined “schizophrenia.”
I was mighty happy to hear I didn’t have it.
It never felt like me, anyway.
Those fellas down at The Clarke Institute of Psychiatry just jumped ship. One day they believed I had a “thought” disorder. Then, bingo! They decided I had a “mood” disorder.
Cooooooooool.
They called it an Affective Mood Disorder, but it was also known as Manic Depression.
That “label” didn’t feel right to me either. The “depression” part.
I knew all about mania. I’d had several manic episodes.
I’d stopped sleeping and my mind started racing. Then I didn’t need sleep. The delusions of grandeur started. I’d spend hours at my typewriter creating brilliant prose which turned out to be brilliant ghibberish.
I would progress to psychosis, madness, insanity. I'd lose touch with reality and soar. Up, up and away. Like Super Girl.
Locked away in The Clarke, nothing could bring me down except a drug called Chlorpromazine a.k.a. Thorazine a.k.a. Largactil.
Nicknamed “the chemical lobotomy.”
But clinical depression? Sorry. Never been there or done that.
Still, that label “manic depression” those Clarke shrinks gave me, stuck!
For 15 years.
It changed names. Became bipolar disorder. Still never felt like me.
Then I met Dr. Bob. He came to understand why I hated my label, so he designed one especially for me. A designer label.
He said I had a “unipolar mood disorder with vulnerability to mania.” Perfect.
A little unwieldy, but it fit.
For another 15 years.
Then, on March 22, 2005, my mother read a story in the New York Times by Benedict Carey, headlined –– “Hypomanic? Absolutely. But Oh So Productive.”
“I thought, this sounds like Sandy,” she told me.
My mother should know.
Hypomania is one of nine bipolar spectrum disorders, but way over to one side. It’s exuberance. Living with passion.
Dr. Bob agreed, “But it’s very rare.”
If there must be labels, we all deserve our own designer labels.
No two people have identical minds.
Psychiatric drugs are mass produced to treat psychiatric disorders, not individuals.
The tragedy is that without good “talk therapy” and only drugs, you’re treated like a generic person instead of the unique human being you are.
April 9, 2008
When I walked into my first psychiatrist's office, back in the early 1960s, it never occurred to me that psychotherapy was a beginning with no end.
Can you ever get to the bottom of your mind?
Imagine waking up one morning and saying to yourself: That's it. I've arrived. I know myself. I'm healed. No more psychotherapy.
If you say it too loud and people hear you, they'll think you're crazy.
Then again, were all a little crazy sometimes, aren't we?
My current psychiatrist, Dr. Bob, has mused that psychotherapy is like peeling an onion, layer-by-layer — yet you can never quite reach your core.
I think of psychotherapy as my PhD in me — except I'll never graduate.
Dr. Bob and I have worked together for the last 19 years and counting. He's my coach: a brilliant, kind, empathetic, wise and fine psychiatrist who also happens to be a fine psychotherapist.
That's a rarity, these days.
We have a great relationship. I see him when I feel I need to, and when I leave his office I'm at least 25 pounds lighter, emotionally.
You're wondering what's wrong with me, aren't you? What's my diagnosis?
I've had quite a few — schizophrenia, catatonic schizophrenia, manic depression, affective mood disorder, bipolar disorder, bipolar 1 and hypomania.
You know what? I haven't changed. Only the psychiatric labels have.
Psychiatric diagnostics have always been subjective and unscientific. There is no blood test, x-ray, urinalysis — no medical test that can diagnose a mental illness. Yet.
I don't care about diagnostics because today, I am well.
As a mood stabilizer, I use an anticonvulsant that also treats epilepsy. This one small pill morning and night takes the edge of my exuberant nature.
I am active and engaged with the world, not because of this or any drug. You won't find insight in a pill bottle alone.
I'm healthy because of my studies with Dr. Bob. As a lifelong learner, I'll never stop gaining insight through my psychotherapy.
Every day is a new beginning with new possibilities. A clean slate with no mistakes in it. I don't mind mistakes. They're tough, but they're the greatest teachers of all.
So, welcome to my world. Twice a week, I'm going to explore all kinds of mental health issues, news and views. Mine and yours. I invite your comments, questions, concerns and criticisms.
It's high time we face these mental health issues, take them out of the closet, and look them straight in the eye.
Who cares about diagnoses? They're just labels with a habit of sticking; labels that we tend to internalize. They never really fit and it's high time we peeled them away.
We're people first. Individuals. Unique. If there must be a label, the only one that works for me is human.
We have so much to share.
Let's
talk.
This blog is for you.