I hate when the phone rings at 3:30 AM. It is so alarming. My heart races and there is always a dog resting on me and it makes me feel weighted down and claustrophobic. The gasping and fumbling is also disconcerting. But, I am good at coming to; I wake up in a flash. (I’ve had lots of practice.) My daughter sounded ok. She even said that she will call back at a more decent hour. I am waiting for her call. She wants to leave Australia early.
I have been thinking about clearing out my twitter and facebook accounts – getting rid of barrage of comments like the one on facebook I found this morning in a comment from a woman encouraging parents to get their young kids diagnosed and on meds as soon as a problem arises. UGH. I wrote a fast and furious reply but deleted it. I sounded like a lunatic on a soapbox!
I really had no idea how disturbed I would be by Robert Whitaker‘s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic. If it wasn’t so well-researched, if he had depended more on anecdotal information like Judith Warner, I could discount it. Whitaker’s book consists of hard facts easy to comprehend. It is all so startlingly apparent that it is amazing that we all haven’t heard this before. It is easy to get stuck on the colossal deception the pharmaceutical industry got away with.
The reader only has to take a step away from the psychiatric medical model, the one that we have been convinced by the current professionals in the field to believe without question, and look at the evidence.
Why does the current medical model work in the US? Why have the pharmaceutical companies been so successful in perpetuating the myth that brain chemistry is “off” in individuals who suffer from mental health issues? This fallacy was a misconception from the start, but it thrived with little scientific evidence supporting it. Chemical Imbalance became the problem that had to be fixed. Fix the brain chemistry and you have cured “mental illness”.
“The public was eager to hear of wonder drugs, and this was just the story that the pharmaceutical industry and the nation’s physicians were eager to tell.” ~ from Anatomy of an Epidemic
The earliest formulated neuroleptics (antipsychotics), muscle relaxants (mood stabilizers) and psychic energizers (antidepressants) were pronounced antidotes to specific disorders. This comparison to antibiotics worked in the pharmaceutical industry’s favor. These magic bullets were prescribed as if they were disease fighters.
I am not convinced that mental illness exists as it has been described by the DSM manuals. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals of Mental Disorders is published by the American Psychiatric Association and covers all mental health disorders for both children and adults. It also lists known causes of these disorders, statistics in terms of gender, age at onset, and prognosis as well as some research concerning the optimal treatment approaches.
Mental Health Professionals use this manual when working with patients in order to better understand their illness and potential treatment and to help 3rd party payers (e.g., insurance) understand the needs of the patient. The book is typically considered the ‘bible’ for any professional who makes psychiatric diagnoses in the United States and many other countries.
All of its contributors are funded by the pharmaceutical industry. The industry is feeding itself.
My daughter was a victim of this system. She suffered from emotional distress, born with a brain which never rested, constantly giving her things to worry about. She was unhappy and agitated. We were told that she was depressed and she should be on antidepressants. They made her worse. The diagnoses snowballed when she started seeing psychiatrists. More and more drugs were added to the mix. The industry had created a life-long participant.
Americans are fiercely individualistic. New mothers are told to let the baby cry when put down for a nap or at night to develop self-soothing; in other words, encouraging them to take care of themselves, right from the get-go. A neighbor whose daughter used to wander into the parents bed every night, locked the daughter into her room at the advice of their pediatrician. The mom was a wreck; the daughter was owl-eyed and miserable. The little girl finally cried herself to sleep every night for weeks. Spirit broken, the daughter surrendered. She was a “strong, independent girl” her daddy announced when we saw them on the street.
Independence was valued in this case above all else. This little girl was forced to conquer her demons on her own. Someone like my daughter would not have faired so well. But, I think that that typical family is a good example of what I have been thinking about lately. If we create individuals early on, we do not have life-long responsibility for their emotional well-being later in life. They will have developed lifeskills to rely on. We applaud the ego and encourage our youth to separate themselves to succeed.
When things go wrong, like they did with my daughter, we jump at the quick fix first. This knee-jerk reaction is probably to keep them on track and to not let them fall behind the competition – get through college, find a spouse, secure a job, buy the right house, groom your yard, travel, etc..
The pharmaceutical industry has ready-made answers in pill form to most problems that get in the way of this trajectory. I am the first to admit that I was delighted when my daughter started taking benzodiazepines and relaxed, really relaxed, for the first time in a long time. BUT, look where this quick fix has gotten her. She has increased anxiety and depression and cognitive impairment – all attributed to long term use of benzos. To withdraw from them, she will have to endure tremors, headaches, more anxiety, sleeplessness and physical pain.
What if we weren’t so quick as a society to dump our aging parents into nursing homes? What if we weren’t so quick to shuttle our difficult family members into treatment? What if healing happened at home, in the community, where responsibility isn’t a burden but just part of being an active member of our society? What if we all shared the burden of care? In the simplest of ways – by showing inclusion rather that exclusion, by accepting rather than rejecting.
Impossible. We are individually driven in the States and it is up to the individual to find help. Families are ostracized if they have family members with vulnerabilities. I know this because I have been on the receiving end of smiles and read behind them the relief and desire for a quick retreat to the safety of their conventional families waiting at home.
There will always be the stigma of “mental illness” and people afflicted will never be encouraged to construct a new “self-narrative” for their futures where they are integrated into society, rather than isolated from it. Right from the start when a person describes symptoms that are not within the normal range, a label is slapped on and they are “out of play”. Addiction, “mental illness’, old age, kids who won’t sleep in their own beds – are all considered weak. Less worthy. Less likely to succeed. Out to pasture, out of sight or just forced to conform.
We do not live in a forgiving society.
It is after mid-night in Australia. I haven’t heard from my daughter. If she calls in the middle of the night tonight, I will make her stay on the phone and tell me what’s up. I feel her here with me today. I hope that she is okay.
