Mad in America

The article has an insert section stating "Get Support If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988" It's worth noting that this number has been associated with police interventions and a rise in psychiatric detentions: https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/05/psychiatric-detentions-rise-988/

Your comment sparked some interest in me and I found this article to be very detailed and nuanced: https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/09/ending-silence-psychedelic-therap… If you know other sources on your comment, I would love to check them out as well!

The home page of the site hosting the webpage submitted here, "Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry, and Social Justice" looks to put a lot more emphasis on the social justice, as the authors published on the site define that, than on science in general or psychiatry in particular. This is more a site that advocates for a particular policy point of view than a site that neutrally reviews the latest methodologically careful research. https://www.madinamerica.com/ "

The source isn't just a bit biased, it's hugely biased. Mad in America has an open editorial viewpoint, which is opposition to "the current drug-based paradigm of care" in psychiatry [1]. It's headed by Robert Whitaker, probably best known for his book Anatomy of an Epidemic that questions the routine use of psychiatric drugs [2]. Of course, that doesn't mean the article is useless or not addressing real phenomena. Antidepressant withdrawal is real, and IME it's something you're more likely to hear about as a horror story from a patient (especially if they tried to stop Effexor cold-turkey) rather than as part of standard descriptions of depression treatment and its risks/shortcomings. [1] https://www.madinamerica.com/about-us/ [2] https://www.madinamerica.com/robert-whitaker-new/

Robert Whitaker [1] has looked into the "mental health" industry, and proposes that today's patients do worse on their medications than their unmedicated predecessors. It used to be that people had "episodes", now they have chronic diseases from which they never recover (unless they stop taking their pills). http://www.MadInAmerica.com/

When children are put in unnatural environments that are totally incompatible with the way children's minds actually work, they will not do well. Children should be actively learning, but school puts them in desks. I could have been diagnosed as ADHD in college. This was not a biological problem, but that I didn't care about my classes. Stimulants might have helped me focus better, but ... why? Robert Whitaker [1], author of Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, has looked into these matters, and concluded that the medications make people's conditions worse. [1] http://www.madinamerica.com/

No problem, I like to spread awareness of this stuff! BTW here are a few more RCTs about the relationship https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/03/antidepressants-still-linked-incr… Honestly it's hard to say and I'm not even sure if you'd be able to study this empirically in this population. I do think that's why doctors fall prey to this bias, and especially so in a stigmatized population. "Ah, they were likely to have these symptoms anyway". It would be interesting to do a wider study, but there already was a history of these companies withholding damaging trials and results so I doubt it would be done, especially given that suicides have occurred in these trials. I really do believe that these classes of medications are treated differently due to the great power the industry has on this issue. If you look up the background of NAMI it's quite suspect and reminds me about how doctors were getting textbooks that were written by the opioid prescribing company. NAMI goes on to inform public opinion and then this stuff becomes "fact". I'm glad the "too little serotonin" thing is being examined but it was crazy to see how many weirdly defensive memos and articles there were out when it first came out. I see I'm getting downvotes on my original comment but I do think it's extremely important to examine these intuitions and where they came from, because as we've seen some of this stuff has been based on profits/trial P-hacking/junk science.

I wonder where you get the idea that psychiatric detention is adequate health care, or that it helps patients. Regularly studies pop up pointing out that involuntary treatment in general does not lower the odds of suicide. https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/06/involuntary-hospitalization-incre… And before you ask, doing nothing does work, or at least it beats this option. Yes there are yet better options, actual interested attention from an actual human being, but literally leaving the person on the street works better than any mandatory treatment, and is a lot better than involuntary detention. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1023455/ And frankly, find a local Psychiatrist and ask them this question "Who is best of: a person committing suicide, or a person in involuntary detention NOT committing suicide for 6 months". They will illuminate what causes this problem. So why are we doing this? Well, this gets done to those people to give Police an option to deal with people who've done nothing wrong but are judged to be "at risk" and generally being a nuisance, slowly getting worse but not actually having done anything wrong. Lastly, some people are doing this because they see it as a form of euthanasia. They are ill, or have destroyed their lives (for example with medical bills) beyond repair and they just want out. It takes a long time for them to actually do something about this. Needless to say, any form of "treatment" for this will only…

> Luckily, all my friends are fellow techies who are upper-middle class, and can afford medication and therapy (and in one case, out-of-state long-term hospitalization.) But even with insurance, they're looking at many thousands of dollars of treatment. Please understand that I am not anti-psychiatry at all. Your kid and their friends are best doing intensive therapy, and if necessary, sessions twice per week, outpatient. That is their best bet, health-wise. Because of taking Pristiq (desvenlafaxine) [SNRI] and Rexulti (brexpiprazole) for severe depression, I literally have suffered the worst thing imaginable, a drug side effect known as *akathisia*. In no exaggeration, it is worse than death. You have to move constantly, but it does not relieve the terror that you go through. You cannot physically relax at all. Your mind can only think haunting and terrorizing thoughts. It feels like you have been doused in gasoline, lit on fire, and you have been locked in a coffin. You literally survive moment-by-moment not to kill yourself. By the way, it is gruesomely painful from a perceptual standpoint. One time, when I was extremely sick, I went to the hospital and I had no idea whatsoever when I went to the emergency room that I was in sepsis along with diabetic ketoacidosis, due to being in the throes of akathisia. If you have it severely, it can cause violence and suicide. I had it severely and it lasted for about a year. I have 2 rare immune-mediated neurological disease plus…

This reminds me of the British Psychiatrist R.D. Laing who had a kind of "open house" for people with mental health issues in the late 60s / early 70s, where they could go and live untreatead except as they wished. (There were obvious limits to this, such as violent people not being admitted). One person came to stay and wouldn't talk to anyone, spending the vast majority of his time in his room, and becoming very irritated if anyone spoke to him. He became more and more withdrawn and stopped eating, and the psychiatric team were very concerned about his wellbeing as his weight dropped. One morning he came down from his room, smiling, and asked for a large breakfast. It turned out that he had been trying to count up to one million and back to zero and every time someone spoke to him he'd lose count. Once he'd managed to do it the spell was broken and he was essentially "cured". There are obvious ethical concerns about his treatment, and I often wonder whether he just lapsed back into some other compulsion, but it does make me wonder a great deal about the lack of individual attention and creative thinking about treatments for for patients with mental health issues that the hairdryer incident points to. Found the story: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-post-kingsl…

I don't have a specific source, it's just the impression that I get from having talked to a few people who had trouble with meth amphetamine. One friend's husband brought cocaine home. That was nice, but it got expensive, so they switched to Meth. After a while she realized she didn't like what it was doing to her personality, so she quit. Then the anxiety started. Xanax helped her not care, then she discovered Alcohol... Here's a random quote from a mainstream medical source: "Mood disorders similar to hypomania and mania can be elicited during intoxication with amphetamines. Depression can occur during withdrawal, and repeated use of amphetamines can produce antidepressant-resistant amphetamine-induced depression. ..." - "Amphetamine-Related Psychiatric Disorders" (emphasis added), http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/289973-overview Mad in America makes the case that mental health treatment is a make-work endeavor. http://www.madinamerica.com/

I am asking you to tell me how you came to your conclusions, specifically that: 1) there are "large structural brain differences" between those with and without ADHD, and 2) there is a 'tragically' high co-morbidity between bipolar disorder and ADHD The literature, as best as I could determine, says that there are no large structural differences, and there isn't a tragically high co-morbidity. I pointed you to relevant research articles which say that. It seems that you are trying to change the topic. My tentative hypothesis is that your knowledge of ADHD helps you cope with the disease, and you don't want to evaluate the possibility that some of your knowledge may be incorrect. Rather than point to research which confirms you point (2), you now say that there are "many subtypes, co-morbidity differs based on subtype." That's a perfectly reasonable argument, but it's a different argument than your previous one. You previously wrote "ADHD's co-morbidity with bi-polar disorder is tragically high" not "co-morbitity between some subtypes of ADHD and bi-polar disorder is tragically high." That's okay - this is HN, not peer-reviewed literature and I don't expect you do put in all of the details when you first write something. My question is only, how do you know that what you wrote is true? You pointed me to a video. I stopped after 23 minutes into it because it was low-information content and I didn't like the speaker's style. There are no links to the primary research, no…

It's great when someone replies as thoughtfully as this, and I love your phrase "gently disagree". Would that more disagreements were of this kind. > Well, for something like bipolar disorder this feels like it's true. I agree. The open question is on what level these things are best to be understood. In some sense everything about us is biology, just as in some sense everything is physics. But we don't think of, say, heart disease as best addressed by physics. Similarly, that there is a biological stratum to our actions and feelings does not automatically mean that chronic emotional suffering is best understood as biology. One might as well conclude from the tongue and larynx that language is biology too. And indeed it is, sort of—yet its meaning lies elsewhere. Or you might as well conclude from the importance of neurons to learning that education is brain biology. Why bother with teachers or schools? We should just 'learn' the neurons directly. Such examples are obviously silly, at least given our current knowledge. To know that chronic emotional suffering is a biological disorder requires more than the involvement of biological phenomena in it; it requires an experimentally verified model. My understanding is that we don't have anything close to that. The one that entered the public imagination, the serotonin-deficiency theory, is widely dismissed by experts [1,2,3,4]. The only argument seems to be whether they knew it was false from the beginning or discovered that…

"Let me tell you from personal experience, these people are doing more harm to their children than good." The problem is that the science clearly says the opposite: "At the end of 14 months, core ADHD symptoms were reduced more in the children treated with stimulants than with behavioral therapy. However, at the end of three years, 'medication use was a significant marker not of beneficial outcome, but of deterioration. That is, participants using medication in the 24-to-36 month period actually showed increased symptomatology during that interval relative to those not taking medication.'" http://www.madinamerica.com/madinamerica.com/Children_files/3-year%20f… "At the end of six years, medication use was 'associated with worse hyperactivity-impulsivity and oppositional defiant disorder symptoms,' and with greater 'overall functional impairment.'" http://www.madinamerica.com/madinamerica.com/Children_files/Mta%20at%2… "Within 21 months, 11 percent of children treated with a stimulant for ADHD developed 'psychotic symptoms.'" http://www.madinamerica.com/madinamerica.com/Children_files/Psychotic%… "Two-thirds of the adolescent patients hospitalized for mania at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center had been on stimulants 'prior to the onset of an affective episode.' Stimulants, the researchers concluded, may 'precipitate depression and/or mania in children who would not…

The laws you're pointing to are just the other side of the same coin. The Protestant roots of the US are arguably one of the reasons American culture is so heavily focused on individual responsibility and the idea that people who are addicts are weak and undisciplined. https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/07/history-addiction-ardent-spirits/

> Not that much. Very much so. What we now call Autism Spectrum Disorder was referred to as "childhood schizophrenia" in the DSM-2 [1], things only started moving in the right direction with the DSM-3 [2] when it was finally sort-of recognized as an independent disorder of "infantile autism", but some core elements of ASD like sensory processing differences were only recognized in the DSM-5. There's a good overview at [3]. It's good that criteria are different today, the criteria from decades ago failed to include majority of ways that autism expresses itself, many of which benefit from support and accommodations even though they're not obviously debilitating. [1] https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSM-II.pdf [2] https://aditpsiquiatriaypsicologia.es/images/CLASIFICACION%20DE%20ENFE… [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8531066/

The "medication" is not something anyone gets better with. They become easier to deal with and they essentially live less, both in terms of effective living (thinking, talking, creating) as well as long-term living (life span reduction). As far as your request per sources, here it is: https://www.madinamerica.com/critical-psychiatry-textbook-2/ A background on the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_C._G%C3%B8tzsche

You’re not going to believe it: https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/03/psychiatric-hegemony-marxist-theo…

This roundup concluded that the evidence is not particularly strong: "In short, there is no convincing evidence that playing Tetris actually helps people. The studies have methodological problems, tiny sample sizes, and have failed to replicate. Some found a reduction in “intrusive memories,” but no improvement in outcomes of PTSD or distress." https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/10/tetris-trauma-viral-twitter-threa…

https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04/tms-damaged-my-brain/ It's not safe. It damaged this person. Even one person is a cause for alarm because you cannot undo this.

Just listened to an interesting podcast on psychiatry and capitalism today that mentioned just how desperate big pharma companies are to get their hands on psychadelics. Podcast essentially argues that psychiatry in large part serves to continue enabling capitalism while papering over the people who are incompatible with capitalism via medication. Very interesting pod for sure. https://www.madinamerica.com/2021/10/can-critiques-psychiatry-help-us-…

https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-post-kingsl… is a story that happened at one of the post-Kingsley Hall houses. It is one of the most remarkable things I've run across randomly on the internet (though it turns out to be an excerpt from a book). If you read it, don't bail before you reach the punch line. That the 20-year-old patient had read The Divided Self and specifically asked to be sent to this place indicates how famous Laing was at the peak of his celebrity.

These type of personal anecdote fuelled by a general distrust of 'big pharma' can be very misleading and discourage patients from seeking professional help. I also want to point out that the author of that book she speaks highly of also happened to be the Presiden of the publication[1]. I think not mentioning this fact make the article even less credible. [1] https://www.madinamerica.com/staff-page/

Article that talks about some of the theory behind mental disorders: https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/07/creation-illness-gaming-disorder/ Excerpt: > Carlat: How did you decide on five criteria as being your minimum threshold for depression? > Spitzer: It was just consensus. We would ask clinicians and researchers, “How many symptoms do you think patients ought to have before you would give them a diagnosis of depression?” And we came up with the arbitrary number of five. > Carlat: But why did you choose five and not four? Or why didn’t you choose six? > Spitzer: Because four just seemed like not enough. And six seemed like too much.

Indeed. It seems there is much to learn about how this pseudo-religion is used by the powers that be in order to maintain control: https://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagn…

That made me think of this article from a few years ago: https://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagn…

It is not a wild and extreme accusation. The IRS is known to have targeted Tea party people. More subtle propaganda is already in action too: http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagno…

How can it be a mischaracterization? RW explicitly argued against the blog post in question here: http://www.madinamerica.com/2015/04/psychiatrists-still-promoting-low-… If he was being mischaracterized, wouldn't he have said that instead of repeating exactly what he was claimed to be saying? > pharma companies and psychiatrists are selling drugs that haven't been proven to work by using the monoamine hypothesis Where's your evidence here? SSRIs do work (I assume this is the class of drug we're talking about). For sure, they don't work for some people (or some types of depression; hard to say which is the issue at this point). But they still beat placebo on average. In fact, the monoamine hypothesis was _based_ on the fact that SSRIs work. The cause/effect is the opposite of what it would have to be for your claim to make sense.

Perhaps http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagno…

I think the mental disorder is more an authority disorder, in like "If you don't do as I say then I will declare you a madman". http://www.madinamerica.com/2012/02/why-anti-authoritarians-are-diagno…