Listening to Madness

But if you read any more of this, know this, I am not a scientologist, not one to not give my kids their vacinations if I think they will help them and my kids vaccinations are up to date, I am a person that has struggled with some severe struggles my whole life, I have studied my whole life both professionally and personally, and I have lived a lot of life my whole life, I know what I am talking about, I am well educated, I have done more off these drugs than most of these people might ever on or off these drugs given the circumstances and situations that I have had to deal with while doing it, okay? These drugs are really bad things and they do make a lot of people do some really bad things too and I hate them, but I hate people that like to try to play god when they aren't too!

I won't give any more to you all, I know that the questions that I have asked here can not nor will not probably ever be answered in any scientifically conclusive manner and that lots of people are in jails over mostly the same pills prescribed so called legally and that they have caused suicides, homocides, and other deaths and jailings so go figure that is enough from me

News editor- I am bipolar- take legal meds to treat it and have never taken illegal drugs in my almost 33 years. Newdoc17 is soo right. We who truly have mental illnesses can't hold jobs (keep husbands, boyfriends, friends, do much of anything else) without our meds. Do get real, such assumptions truly make you look like a bad editor.

You are an absolute liar, people that have had some serious problems in their lives and been labeled can do anything that they set their minds to without the drugs with the right opportunities in life and the right resources, that doesn't require a pill does it, and no you don't have to take it and it is no different if you call it a legal pill or they call me taking it an illegal pill okay?

Enter

http://emusicwire.org/10258245/going-sane-in-crazy-world-proves-to-be-cohesive-chaos.html

http://www.41yo.com/?p=2058

I withdrew from my drugs by myself 'cause I didn't have ANYBODY at all. You think a psychiatrist who gets paid by drug companies to distrbute their drugs along with their paraphanalia, is going to tell me it's okay to withdraw? I was reading a book about withdrawing, but basically had no support the book advised someone who wants to wean themselves off of pysch drugs should get, so I did it all by myself without any friendly support. WHERE ARE ALL MY FRIENDS?

I promise you ppl if you trace most of the depressional problems you will probably find its due to GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION!!!

My bipolar is an ILLNESS and little more. I deal with it continually like any chronic disease, but it does not define me, and I do not want it to. I will not embrace the monster that has been the source of so much agony in my life. I will not celebrate the beast that has nearly cost me my life on more than one occasion. It is a curse, and I do all that I can to banish it.

If others out there feel differently, I suppose that is their prerogative. It makes little sense to me. However, if that person's choices cause them to be a burden on or a danger to society, I question whether treatment should be optional. This isn't just about the affected or the "gifted" or whatever - they need to realize the impact that their actions will have on the community outside of themselves.

I appreciate the desire for personal choice and liberty, but it seems to me that this is a poor choice of issues on which to take that kind of a stance.

Mental illness comes in many forms and has many faces, our military soldiers are facing steps towards mental illness, our children, our co-workers and almost everyone you know probably has a mental illness. To define the definite needs of each person individually you have to pinpoint their mental illness. Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, Schizophrenia be it either or, we all are faced daily with someone who has a definite illness. many believe that depression leads to mental illness. It's a tough decision, but when you have been walking around with depression for years without any help or answers it could be devastating. your loved ones are removed from your environment for thier own good but who knows what treatment they are recieving while away from home. It will be up to the individuals that mental illness really affect to keep track of aftercare. Alzhiemer is probably another mental illness. WE are bombarded and have to look after one another one way or another=The New Frontier should be just to care for one another and practice empathy in order to make a friend you first have to be a friend....be it here or globally.

http://www.amazon.com/Going-Sane-Crazy-World-Explicit/dp/B002AEBBDO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1242920114&sr=8-3

Heres my explanation and justification...........

As an adult with two siblings who have been diagnosed with "mental illness" this is what I would like to say: Sure, if you can function responsibly in society, provide for yourself, take care of your children, stay out of trouble with the law, then by all means, if you don't want to stay on meds that's an individual choice. But when being on meds provides stability, ability to work and take care of oneself, and you choose to go off the meds, which in turn leads you to being fired, not being able to hold down a job or provide for yourself, ending up in the hospital and being a burden to society and creating suffering for all who are close to you, then yes - I believe one has a duty to oneself, one's loved ones, and society, to stay on meds. I've seen firsthand how meds can help - it can be miraculous. And yes, there are really times when the person who is ill is ill in such a way that they cannot understand they are ill, nor understand that they are not "themselves," til after they are brought back with the meds. The real problem is with the way society views medication, and those who have brain conditions - we don't affix stigma upon people who rely on drugs such as statins for their blood pressure, or beta blockers for the heart - so why do we attach so much stigma to psychiatric meds? It is sad, that in this day and age, people with the mildest of symptoms, e.g. our children who are less than perfect, are immediately rushed to medications, whereas those with severe psychiatric disorders are left untreated, to sleep in our prisons and out on the streets.

Alissa Quart (5/18) reports that Will Hall "...periodically descends into dreadful mental states...considers harming himself or develops paranoid fantasies about his colleagues and neighbors...[and] occasionally thinks that plants are communicating with him." Yes, sometimes in psychiatry--as in general medicine--the line between health and disease is blurry. But no further evidence is needed, beyond Quart's description, to show that the differences between mental illness and mental health are not merely "arbitrary."

Ronald Pies MD
The writer is a psychiatrist with Upstate Medical University in Syracuse NY and Tufts University in Boston

I wanted to say this Newsweek article is really good. Will, you are so brave to be so out there in public like this as I also know that to do so in today???s atmosphere of bio psychiatry, A.C.T. teams and forced drugging is taking a dangerous stance with your dangerous gift and can be very risky on a personal level. I still believe that if more of us can manage to take the chance that things will change despite the system???s resistance to it. I even believe there will be less people experiencing psychosis in the first place if there is LESS pressure applied to them, which is often, in my opinion, causing the problem the system is trying to ???cure.???
It is the public that needs to hear another side of the same kind of experience so that the stilted perspective they get on it now will not be accepted unquestioned.
The emotional connection you made to the writer of the piece, so that she could see the SIMILARITY between 'us' and 'them' is a very important one. More important I believe than most people understand. I am aiming at something similar here in my own locale in Canada, as much of what gets psychiatrized in one person is routinely ???overlooked??? or seen as ???normal??? in those who are not psychiatrized. Yet the public for the most part does not even NOTICE this. It needs to be pointed out and you are very good at doing that in a way that gets accepted and heard.
You were among the first people to connect to me personally when I got on line in 2002, or 3, for the first time, and my respect for you has grown since then also. These connections provided me with a sense of community I did not have concretely and I am sure such feelings of similar experience with others did much to speed up my own recovery process. I would say you are likely one of my all time favourites among the ???mad??? (not counting myself of course!)
Keep talking Will. Things are changing.

I like the idea of right to choice when it comes to medications, but I have some major concerns about these ideas. One is that not all patients with severe mental illnesses have an ability to choose for themselves, so already some patients in the mental health system are excluded. My other consern is about legal aspects of this. Are the patients who choose no medication then going to use services like declairing bankrupsy when they go on a manic shopping spree, or will they want to pleed not guilty by reason of insanity when they've commited a violent crime. There should be some kind of mechanism where as when the right not to take medication is exercised, then they give up the right to make use of their mental illness as a reason out of legal trouble.

I feel that if you are a single or an adult with out children you may live your life without medications. I work in the mental health field as an child and adolescent case manager and have seen the damage parents with a mental health diagnosis have caused their children. Parents may not get up and care for their children, may use bill money on a shopping spree, couple that with people who may self medicate with alcohol/drugs to control their symptoms and you have yet another cycle of issues to deal with 20 years from now. Keep looking for a therapist and psychiatrist you trust and even better than that while your children are young and need you most put them first.

My mother is bipolar, and for some time I had been falsely diagnosed with "mental disease" before they determined that I just had traumatic experiences in childhood which I got over later. This clued me into the fact that there's almost no way to distinguish between "legitimate" psychiatric disorder and normal reactions to extremely bad situations much of the time. But once you label someone "mentally ill", it becomes internalized into their self concept that they are "crazy." They are tarred for life with what is the modern day social equivalent of demonic possession, except that now we as a society don't believe that anyone can really be "cured" or excised of these demons. I think that the frame is all wrong; people should have medications available to them but should not be forced to take them under any circumstances if they don't want to. If they pose a threat to society imprison them like you would anyone else, but otherwise don't impose your conceptions of normality into people's lives unless they explicitly request you to.