dagblog - Comments for "Mind Altering Drugs For A 7 Year Old"

Please read up on this recent

Orion — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 22:29:25 +0000

Please read up on this recent killing by a young 20 something year old female - she wiped out her entire family with a handgun. No history of mental illness mentioned yet in the news reports. She shot her own toddlers in the head.

I realize the past has never been peachy keen but surely this all is a bit abnormal?

Holmes and Loughner are the really obvious people. People like that young woman - they are the ones that really illustrate something being amiss. The instances of violent individuals in the past - natural born killer types, the homeless, seriously mentally ill - those aren't the ones committing alot of these shootings. Very normal people seem to literally be "going off."

I don't have a lot of

artappraiser — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:59:13 +0000

In reply to I wanted to contact you

I don't have a lot of research stored on my hard drive or anything like that, that's not what's going.on. More and more from our discussions I am starting to think this is what's going on: I am much older and have followed these issues for a much longer time than you. You see the current horror and think it's a negative progression. I see the current horror and the past horrors, I don't see things as worse, just different, from attempts by society to make things better that haven't worked out as planned. So I can quickly google examples to counter your rosy view of the past and a more nuanced view of the present.

Yes, psychiatry is pitifully primitive and "they" don't know what they are doing fiddling chemically with everyone's neurotransmitters and how they fiddle with them is furthermore influenced by the profit motive. But this fiddling was instituted by a desire to make miserable and sick people feel better, Orion, and to stop the widespread cruel institutionalization of abnormal people and to stop behavior like dropping out of school, not learning to read and write, running away from home, self-medicating with alcohol or addictive street drugs and getting involved with crime thereafter, getting pregnant at 14, parents beating or tying up children they couldn't handle, etc.

From my historical perspective, I just don't see the poorly prescribed psychoactive drugs as much of an underlying cause of anything as you do. It is just another bad complication from trying to solve a major human problem. Taking them away is not going to solve what |I see as longstanding underlying problems.

Another example comes to mind right now raising the issue of homelessness. When I first moved to NYC in the early 80's, we had a major serious problem of more than a few violently mentally ill people on the streets. Anyone who spent time in Manhattan knew about them, you didn't even have to read a newspaper to know, you ended up seeing them dosomething scary yourself, and it made people afraid of all the homeless. They are now gone. Gone. You don't see them anymore. I find it hard to believe they all died and weren't replaced by more like them, they are either on meds that make them less violent or locked up.

I think your equation of the damage that overuse of psychoactive drugs does and violence against society is faulty. I am sure that the overuse and misuse is making a lot of people's lives miserable. I am less convinced of the connection between that and violence. I've seen where letting mentally ill free on the streets unmedicated and unsupervised adds to violence. I have found few of your recent claims that spree killers were pushed to act by meds to be credible or provable. I actually feel from my reading that most of them might have not done it if they had been more heavily and correctly medicated; I don't know for sure, but I just don't see much evidence for your side of it. I am staying open on that, but you haven't shown me much of a case.

An example of where I am coming from right now: so far looks to me like people like James Holmes and Jared Loughner were seriously mentally ill with violent tendencies, not normal people pushed to mental illness by meds! The meds were not the problem, the mental illness was. You have two choices in our current pitiful state of psychiatric medicine with people like this: let them freely move about but forcibly medicate them to a state of partial sanity and monitor their state of mind and monitor their activities, or institutionalize them. Neither of those choices are pretty. But I just don't agree that in the past|Jared Loughner or James Holmes would have been leading a happy life on the farm with family and friends keeping them in line. More likely they would end up like Ed Gein or the fictional Norman Bates.

I think you often confuse the save-able with the un-saveable, that's part of the problem. And BTW, by doing so, you risk making people afraid of people like you,.stigmatizing people who would never act out on violent thoughts they might have from time to time for whatever reason, whether the thoughts are because of SSRI's or an unstable blood sugar problem.

Wait till "Johnnie comes

Resistance — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 10:46:50 +0000

In reply to Seriously mentally ill folks

Wait till "Johnnie comes marching home again"; they’ve been trained to kill?

Charles Whitman: The Texas Bell Tower Sniper — Lost Innocence ...

Charlie spent the first part of his stint with the Marines at Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba. He worked hard at being a good Marine, following orders dutifully and studying hard for his various examinations. He earned a Good Conduct Medal, the Marine Corps Expeditionary Medal, and a Sharpshooter's Badge. Chillingly, the records of his scores on shooting tests show that he scored 215 out of 250 possible points, that he excelled at rapid fire from long distances, and that he seemed to be more accurate when shooting at moving targets. Captain Joseph Stanton, Executive Officer of the 2nd Marine Division remembered, "He was a good marine. I was impressed with him. I was certain he'd make a good citizen."

I wanted to contact you

Orion — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:51:24 +0000

In reply to I think psychiatry should a

I wanted to contact you privately about alot of the research you pulled together.

But I also have heartbreak for the stories I have read of parents who are not just at wit's end dealing with violently mentally ill teen males of considerable size, but actual physical abuse and threats to life from them. Do you allow the parents to just abandon them to the street, have them locked up in prisons, or put the kind of institutions of yore where physical restraints and electro shock were used instead of meds?

The police are there for a reason in nearly every part of the world - because even the best people commit even minor crimes of some kind at some point. I wish family had called police when I really flew the coup during SSRI withdrawal - they do bring clarity to situations.

Of course, I wasn't doing anything like these folks have done so my projection may be a problem, like you've said. Perhaps training police to be able to deal in situations like that would be a good idea.

It's obvious that kids now are being brought in to the dehumanizing world of psychiatry for reasons that have nothing to do with them being a real threat to other's safety. I used to get told that my keeping action figures in their cases (I did so because they'd be worth more money that way) instead of playing with them was evidence I had OCD - or something like that? These poor kids are growing up in a climate of total fear - they will never get to really be themselves because they will have to worry constantly that literally anything they do is proof of some chemical imbalance.

There was a line in the book The Kite Runner, which applies to how kids grow up now - one guy said of the Taliban, "They don't let you be human." It's the same mentality in psychiatry. Just like organized religion, much of psychiatry is based on stuff that's not real - so people who believe in it find themselves torturing themselves as they try to adhere to principles that were made up.

Your bit about "leaving people on the street" sticks out too. Our entire economic system leaves alot of people in the streets - after I got baptized LDS, I spent more than a few nights "sleeping outside" (that's how he and I put it) with a guy from church who simply couldn't afford to live anywhere in the Seattle area. That's a whole separate issue, of course.

At this point, also, that number on ADHD prescriptions I mentioned was actually 14 million per month. It's obvious that not that many people really have ADHD. If they did, it wouldn't be a disorder.

Isn't there some sort of

Orion — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 08:31:25 +0000

In reply to Seriously mentally ill folks

Isn't there some sort of middle road here? At this point, psychiatric medication and treatment is a commercial enterprise - it's literally advertised on television!

I think there's got to be some sort of place in between that and the sort of institutionalization we used to have.

Seriously mentally ill folks

artappraiser — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 02:21:53 +0000

In reply to This may not be the response

Seriously mentally ill folks of older generations somehow keep it together and don't go firing assault weapons as frequently.

BUT THEY DID do that when they could, from Worst mass shootings in U.S. history slideshow, My San Antonio:

Sept. 6, 1949, Camden, N.J.
Army veteran Howard Unruh gunned down 13 people while walking around his neighborhood. He was declared a paranoid schizophrenic and sent to a psychiatric hospital without a trial. He died in 2009 at a Trenton, N.J., nursing facility.
Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Aug. 1, 1966, University of Texas at Austin
Charles Whitman opened fire from the school's clock tower, killing 16 people and wounding 31 before officers killed him.
Photo: AP

What's different? I would argue:

1) Many more assault weapons and ammunition in circulation and much easier access to them.

2) Mass emotional reaction to such events and mass media coverage of them gives some mentally ill thoughts of "Fame! I'm going to live forever!" and delusions of empowerment from plotting similar. Must of course be bigger and better than the last to get a rise out of the country (video games and terrorist attacks can assist if the person is lacking in imagination.)

3) We don't lock mentally ill up in institutions and throw away the key, we try to treat them outside institutionalization. (You only need to look to the movie Rain Man for an example of what was standard: an autistic, sent to an institution as a child by his family after putting too much hot water in his baby brother's bath. Worse cases were locked up less pleasantly.)

You can use the contact

artappraiser — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:53:12 +0000

In reply to BTW is there a way to message

You can use the contact feature here but you have to notify me publicly here somehow (like in a comment) that you have done so. Because I am registered with an email account that I use mainly as a junk email address and I don't check it regularly, but will check it if I am told to do so. Also make it clear in the subject somehow that you are from DagBlog or you are Orion.

Must warn you that I'm not into getting into lengthy private discussions, I much prefer spending the time on public discussion where there is the chance of more input than just two people. I really should be answering emails right now, but I'm not, I'm posting here--that should tell you something.

I think psychiatry should a

artappraiser — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:45:52 +0000

In reply to This may not be the response

I think psychiatry should a consensual, adult phenomenon.

I am very open to this argument. But I also have heartbreak for the stories I have read of parents who are not just at wit's end dealing with violently mentally ill teen males of considerable size, but actual physical abuse and threats to life from them. Do you allow the parents to just abandon them to the street, have them locked up in prisons, or put the kind of institutions of yore where physical restraints and electro shock were used instead of meds?

BTW is there a way to message

Orion — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:40:06 +0000

In reply to This may not be the response

BTW is there a way to message you privately, artappraiser?

This may not be the response

Orion — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:24:58 +0000

In reply to Glad you found it helpful,

This may not be the response that you may be expecting buuut, I am aware of how much of what I'm writing sounds and there is a goal in mind to it.

I think psychiatry should a consensual, adult phenomenon. It should be a crime and seen as an atrocity to force children in to it. Doing so has never helped a child and led to alot of death. Alot of death.

Right now it's literally a million dollar industry to tell children that they have chemical imbalances - all so that teachers can get bigger subsidies from the federal government and pharmaceutical companies can make money off of ADHD drugs, anti-anxiety drugs, etc. It makes so much money, actually, that ADHD drugs are now being handed out to kids who don't even have ADHD. 14 million prescriptions apparently - do we really believe all those are people who legitimately have ADHD? Really? If that many have ADHD, it must not really be a disorder.

Sandy Hook was the 9/11 of this ongoing atrocity. Mentally ill are everywhere in society along with guns. Most of the worst mass shootings keep happening in schools or involving young adults. Seriously mentally ill folks of older generations somehow keep it together and don't go firing assault weapons as frequently. That's not a coincidence.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that the first generation to do worse financially than their parents is also the first to have grown up being told there was something wrong with their brain.