Psychiatrists Wrong . . . Again

Peace be with you

The New York Times said this morning that the silly psychiatrists were manipulating the wrong damn neurotransmitter in schizophrenics. It turns out it wasn’t the dopamine after all. How many school shootings could the psychiatrists have saved us?

The Psychiatrists poison the peoples of the world on a guess and they ALWAYS guess wrong. They’re still wrong. It’s not going to be any different with their new theory.

The Pharmaceutical corporations only care about the profit. They make drugs like Zyprexa for a government contract worth billions. You add on to that the diabetes medicines they sell as accessory to their Zyprexa and you have the backbone of the Eli Lilly profits.

Another idea might come from Hearing Voices Network. The following two paragraphs come from Guidelines for Hearing Voices Groups in Clinical Settings (2004 update). I suggest you read it all.

love eternal
tad


From: Guidelines for Hearing Voices Groups in Clinical Settings
Voice hearing is often seen as a prime symptom of psychosis (American Psychiatric Association, 1994). However there are a significant proportion of the voice hearing populations that have never been psychiatric patients (Honig et al.,1998). Hearing voices (auditory hallucinations) is considered a first rank symptom of the specific psychosis of schizophrenia (Schneider, 1959). There are
three main psychiatric categories of patients that hear voices; schizophrenia (around 50%); affective psychosis (around 25%) and dissociative disorders (around 80%) (Honig et al., 1998).

However, many people who hear voices find them helpful or benevolent (Romme & Escher, 1993). In a large study of 15,000 people it was found that there was a prevalence of 2.3% who had heard voices frequently and this contrasts with the 1% prevalence of schizophrenia (Tien, 1991). In a study by Honig and others (1998), of the differences between non-patient and patients hearing voices, it was not in form but content. In other words the non-patients heard voices both inside and outside their head as did the patients but either the content was positive or the hearer had a positive view of the voice and felt in control of it. By contrast the patient group were more frightened of the voices and the voices were more critical (malevolent) and they felt less control over them (Honig et al,1998). The experience of hearing critical voices is often very anxiety provoking and leads to high levels of depression and suicidality (Harkavy-Friedman et al., 2003). Conventional approaches in psychiatry to the problem of voice hearing have been to ignore the meaning of the experience for the voice hearer and concentrate on removing the symptoms (audio hallucinations) by the use of physical means such as medication (Romme & Escher, 1989). Although anti-
psychotic medication is very helpful to most sufferers of psychosis (Fleischhaker, 2002), there is a significant proportion (30 per cent) that still experience the ‘symptoms’ such as hearing voices despite very high doses of injected anti-psychotic (Curson, Barnes, Bamber, & Weral, 1985). The social psychiatrist Marius Romme, believes that anti-psychotic medication prevents the emotional processing and therefore healing, of the meaning of the voices (Romme & Escher, 2000). Traditional practice in behavioural psychology concentrated on either distracting the patient or ignoring references by the patient to the voice hearing experience, with the hope that the patient would concentrate on ‘real’ experiences, which would then be positively reinforced (the assumption being that the voice hearing was a delusional belief). The effect of this approach may well have been to discourage the discussion about the voice hearing experience but without eradicating it (P.D.J. Chadwick, Birchwood, & Trower, 1996). However brain imaging has since confirmed that voice hearers do experience a sound as if there were a real person talking to them (Shergill, Brammer, Williams, Murray, & McGuire, 2000). Within the last ten years there has been considerable interest in the phenomenology, processes and coping mechanisms of people suffering from psychosis, using a broadly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approach (Drury, Birchwood, & Cochrane, 2000; Haddock, Morrison, Hopkins, Lewis, & Tarrier, 1998; Kuipers et al., 1998; Morrison, 2002; Norman & Townsend, 1999). Some practitioners advocate that CBT is the most appropriate, evidence based approach (Tarrier, Haddock, Barrowclough, & Wykes, 2002). Other practitioners, including psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses have developed a broader based alliance of therapeutic approaches to psychosis from the spectrum of approaches from psychodynamic to cognitive behavioural (Martindale & International Society for the Psychological Treatments of the Schizophrenias and other Psychoses., 2000). Radical changes have also been taking place amongst psychiatrists (Kingdon & Turkington, 1998; Perris & McGorry, 1998), who are now paying closer attention to the meaning and content of the voices (Romme & Escher, 1989).