Public Comment

Psychiatric medications are typically dispensed to people who show severe signs of a mental affliction. Such a person could behave in ways that do not make sense. They may be "gravely disabled" and unable to care for themselves, to do such basics as showering, washing clothes, cleaning up after oneself, paying bills, and more. Secondly, a person could be considered severely ill if they behave violently with no apparent reason. And third is where there are suicide attempts or self-mutilation. None of this is cheery stuff. The standard practice is to give medication, in some instance by force. Yet, psych meds have their own problems. They affect health and they affect well-being. The side effects may cause physical and mental suffering. 

You can't talk a person out of their mental illness because talk, to a severely mentally ill person, is not handled by the brain in a usable manner. Talk could be ignored or misinterpreted. You can't scare a person into getting well. Also, "electroconvulsive therapy" doesn't work to fix psychiatric disorders. You can't grab a person by the shoulders, shake them and tell them "Snap out of it!" (Derived from early Hollywood.) You must change the chemical balance within the brain. The medication may do this and may be effective at bringing back a somewhat normal consciousness. Yet at what cost? 

I have read one or two books about early psychiatry. One of them was "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"; it was fiction, but it gave some idea of conditions in a state hospital in the early days. Another book I read was by Paul de Kruif, "A Man Against Insanity." I read the book when I was a teen, and it is bitterly ironic that my condition began a few years later. (De Kruif was well-known as author of "Microbe Hunters" a look into the history of microbiology.) 

The medications we currently have for psychiatric illness do horrible things to the human body, and sometimes to the mind. E. Fuller Torrey is a highly awarded, highly renowned research psychiatrist, and author of "Surviving Schizophrenia." 

Torrey is notorious among psychiatric survivors because of his extreme views, not limited to the espousal of forced treatment. I have a problem with going into excess with forced treatment because it short-circuits any possibility of a mental health consumer learning on our own and taking charge of our own lives. It doesn’t attribute any kind of mental capacity to people who suffer from conditions that affect consciousness. He is hated by many self-help advocates for this and other reasons. Yet even Torrey himself asserts that the medications we currently have aren't good enough. 

Psych meds cause all manner of medical, debilitating, and in some instances, disfiguring complications. I can't list them here, but I will mention that weight gain and diabetes are very common among those who take olanzapine. And tardive dyskinesia causes involuntary movements of the tongue, face, head, neck and upper body, causing a person inability to do self-care and possibly afraid to go out in public. Other than that, some psych meds can just kill you.  

This week's column is not intended to enable the reader to stop your medication. The fact is, if you have a severe mental illness diagnosis, you have to take medication--or else. Or else you will have untreated mental illness, and this is a potential threat to your life, your brain, your liberty, and everything else that you value. 

In early psychiatry, doctors would cut off the frontal lobes of the brain in psychotic people, making it possible for them to function well enough to fry an egg. (I remember this from de Kruif's book.) 

In more recent times, doctors have espoused zapping the brain with magnetic pulses. Since I'm familiar with electromagnetic theory from my electronics background, I can tell you it is no different than electroconvulsive therapy. The magnetic coil placed up to the head causes electrical current in the brain. However, in my position in writings as a well-informed and experienced psychiatric survivor and amateur, and not a mental health professional, I can't recommend this or oppose it. 

It takes work and effort to live with psychiatric illness. The treatments are horrible. The diseases, if severe, are worse. It is up to you--or maybe it's not.