Unless you live in a cave in Patagonia, you will have heard angry mutterings about whether people, especially young people, who have decided they were born the wrong sex/gender, should be given medical assistance/treatment while they "transition" to the opposite gender/sex when they ask for it.
This drug (sodium valproate) has been around for a long time and is extensively used in psychiatry. It was invented before epigenetic effects were known, long before gene technology was developed in modern form. Nobody at the time had a clue how it worked, and certainly not at the level described in this paper. On p568, they say: "We have proposed that demethylation might be a critical mechanism in metastasis and that DNA demethylating agents should be avoided when there is a concern for the development of metastasis (29,51). Therefore, the use of VPA and other HDAC inhibitors might be associated with similar problems."
All anticonvulsants have a huge range of side effects but if this one induced cancers or encouraged metastasis (spread), I think it would have become clear by this stage. So far, all they can say is "Be careful, these drugs have unpredictable side effects," which is hardly rocket science.
Drug manufacturers always try to find new uses of their stuff, they can make a tiny change and then get a new patent, which is much easier and cheaper than digging for gold.
I really appreciate you looking into this. It continually bothers me to take drugs that I don’t understand and highly suspect are toxic. My new psych practitioner told me that the Depakote was probably causing blood clotting issues and helped me get off some of it. Right now I’m trying to stabilize. I’ve been on a number of psycho pharmaceuticals for around the last 25 years. There are a number of things that make getting off psych drugs not easy for me. A big problem is not knowing what the drugs are likely doing. If I don’t know what they are doing, it gets hard to do targeted testing. It’s hard to fix what is not known to be broken. Too many people like to tell me that I have nothing to worry about. They tend to look at my concerns about the potential hazards of the psych drugs like such concerns are some kind of unrealistic paranoia or psychosis. Is there any biological process or function in the human body that we are sure either goes unaffected or even benefits from the administration of any patented psycho pharmaceuticals? Here is an article I found online that goes into some of the problems with psych drugs. It is incredibly hard for me to believe that it covers everything. The big Pharma induced information desert on the internet is vast.
I did a search on refseek that said “ The economic underpinnings of a mental health diagnosis “. It was yet another search that came up dry for what I was looking for. For a long time I wondered why I was mentally ill and what I could do to no longer be mentally ill. I saw one time on television a court case that gave me a big clue. Apparently a woman was going into houses uninvited and doing cleaning. When she was brought to court for trespassing, she pleaded insanity. Apparently she was found guilty of trespassing for one reason. She demanded payment for what she was doing. This was the big piece in the puzzle. It started to become clear to me what the drugs and psych hospitalizations were really about. The problem was not really psychiatric, it was economic. All the DSM labels pretty much boiled down to one label-EDD(employment deficit disorder). The most disgusting of things can easily seem like the most amazing of things simply by some cash dished out because of some numbers on a price tag. Mood swings are not really the most desirable thing in the world but if they tend to make people millionaires with lucrative ideas, then all of a sudden people are looking for ways to become bipolar. What I am getting at is that there is a huge financial factor in what gets deemed mental “illness” and I’m not sure very many people are paying attention to it.
This point is not trivial. I have shown that the main reason ECT is used so much is the enormous financial returns it generates for next to no work by the operators. See McLaren N (2017). Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Critical Perspective. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 19: 91-104
Similarly, psychiatry has no treatment for personality disorder, so can't make any money from it. I have set out a case arguing that psychiatry is engaged in a massive, long-term program of rediagnosing people with personality disorders as "mentally ill," esp. bipolar disorder, and putting them on drugs for life.
Chapterrs 14-16 in McLaren N (2012). The Mind-Body Problem Explained: The Biocognitive Model for Psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.
This whole real life little house of horrors appears to be packed full of financial factors from top to bottom. However, something very dark and rotten seems to be working in the background. Something is warping the minds and hearts of the mental ward staff and many of the patients. Some patients try to escape the drugs only to run into a dead end and inevitably succumb to the overwhelming narrative. Psych nurses learn to take orders like storm troopers in a Star Wars movie. Patients who do not openly question the narrative of the system tend to get better treatment. Patients who try to reason their way out of taking psych drugs are made to look ignorant or if necessary dismissed as psychotic. In my case, the only people who can get me off psych drugs are psychiatrists and the psychiatrists who are willing to do that are almost always private psychiatrists. Even those psychiatrists can be difficult to find and they are by no means cheap. I must do what I can to stay out of the mental hospital. The psychiatrists in there are nearly always firm dogmatic believers in the almighty pharmaceutical psychotropic. Almost always with the usual psychiatrist, when everything is fine then there is no dose change, if things are not fine then it is time for more “medication”. Rarely are there exceptions. So many psych practitioners have a cold heartedness that seems to defy reasonable understanding. One psych NP basically told me that she prescribes drugs and that is just what she does. There is something in psychiatry that seems to go beyond mere greed. There is something that shuts off the natural part of the heart that feels and shows compassion. It looks like something that goes beyond just something economic. It looks demonic.
I have some questions, but the questions start with a simple question. Are relationships priceless? If relationships are not priceless, would they by logic not have a price? If relationships have a price, would not the higher priced relationships give better benefits to a person than lower priced relationships? Does real life bear this out? Do the wealthy who spend large sums of money on relationships live happier more fulfilling lives? If real life does not bear this out, if money has nothing to do with a good and healthy relationship or if money has a detrimental effect on relationships, then the question remains, are relationships priceless? If relationships are priceless, why are people profiteering from them?
Tonight I was going into a depression. I tried to see if the staff could help me talk it through. They were too busy to help me much. I found a resident who asked simple questions and listened. From what I can tell, he’s gone through a lot of the same stuff I have. He’s not a professional but he seemed to help me a lot more than the people who were paid to help me and to help the other residents. There may have been a loop in my subconscious telling me that people don’t care. It may be that over the course of my life that loop kept getting reenforced. This may shed some light on where mental disturbance comes from.
I went to refseek and searched for “ The psychological effects of mental health propaganda on psychiatric patients “. What it came up with was hardly related to what I was looking for. Apparently no one in academia has even lifted a finger to find out how the messages drummed into mental health patients affect mental health outcomes. For some reason it never dawned on any one in the mental health field that if you told a person that a mental health condition they had was not permanent instead of relentlessly telling them that it was permanent and gave them messages of hope that they could live fairly normal normal lives free of psych drugs instead of relentlessly telling them that they needed psych drugs for the rest of their lives that somehow that could change mental health outcomes. We do it for smoking. We do it for street drugs or alcohol. I’m sure that anyone with a little more than a refrigerator IQ would whole heartedly agree that it works in those instances, but God forbid that we tell anyone on psych drugs something like that. Oh no, we can never give anyone eternally decreed to be psychologically deficient by the psychiatric priesthood such dangerous ideas. I guess it was even fruitless to even look for a paper like that. Who would be crazy enough to publish such anathema.
I found this link on X(twitter). Is SSRI induced sexual dysfunction or any kind of PSSD a factor in the trans movement? I don’t know. From my experience though, psych drugs can easily mess up the head. The culture can also easily mess up people’s heads. People who have post graduate degrees tend to have a huge sway in public opinion. If I say something that looks outside the mainstream narrative, I risk looking crazy. Because I take psych pills, saying something that looks crazy can easily influence psych practitioners to push more psych drugs down my throat (or sometimes into the arm or butt). However, if I can point to a psychiatrist and say “hey, I’m not alone” then I don’t look so crazy anymore. PSSD for me is hard to prove. I was on SSRI’s/SNRI’s for around 20 years (how I was able to get off of them is a bit of a long story) but I don’t know for sure what is or isn’t in my case just old age. One aspect of psych drug related sexual dysfunction that I don’t see addressed much is the relational, social and all too often occupational effects of prolonged psych drug maintenance and with it community stigma and disfunction. Maintenance of psych drugs can easily be devastating to a person’s ability to give back to the community and socialize in a way that develops healthy relationships. When healthy relationships are hard to develop, sexual relationships become very hard to develop. The relational and emotionally cognitive impairments caused by the psych drugs easily, slowly and insidiously box a person into institutionalized settings. The prolonged demand to take substances that are meant to treat mental illness inevitably set up the foundations for a prolonged isolation from society. By all means never become mentally ill, because the cure you are demanded to take will very likely be worse than the disease itself.
The mental hell system is adept at pushing propaganda. I was talking to a guy this morning who thought that he was abnormal because he took psych drugs. Apparently he is a long time veteran of the mental hell system. He heard the same story so many times and had the drugs forced on him for so long that he believed that he was just destined to a life of mental disability. He apparently believed that he was born mentally ill. He did not know who else to blame for this than the Creator of the Universe. The mental hell propaganda isn’t just drilled into the heads of those directly under the filth ridden boot of psychiatry. It is also drilled into the minds of the psych nurses and confirmed when the psych nurses are not taught to distinguish between withdrawal and mental distress (or “illness”) when patients come off the drugs. The “experts”(psych “doctors”) own the narrative in the psych wards and in the general population in regards to psychiatric care. With the narrative comes the power and people all too often underestimate the corruptive nature of power (even the psych “experts” who know they should know better).
This is a very emotional and inspiring video. If this woman has something to give, I’m sure I must also have something to give. Again, I appreciate that you are responding to my comments. Nearly all psychiatrists are way too busy to be doing what you are doing.
I sent the link to my sister in law who has a medical degree. She seems to think that the article is basically saying that Depakote could be used to treat cancer. If this is true, wouldn’t repurposing Depakote for cancer treatment be a huge business opportunity for the makers of Depakote?
I’m in the US in a group home. I have a diagnosis of Bipolar, OCD, High functioning autism (or I guess what used to be Asperger’s) and Schizo-Effective. I think I kind of get what you’re saying about autism. I tried to read Tony Atwood’s “Asperger’s syndrome” a long time ago. Half of it seemed to very much describe me and the other half just didn’t seem to at all. When I was younger my mother would tell me that I had autism. I didn’t get it until I read an article about it in a magazine. The article had a series of faces and said that a normal person can know from seeing those faces what those people are feeling but that the person with autism couldn’t really tell very well. Some of them were easy, but many if not most of them I wasn’t really sure about. At that point, I was pretty sure I had autism. When I was younger, I was in a private religious school. At lunch time the kids would converse. It continually would puzzle me how each kid would know when to speak so that there would be a group conversation going on. I would sit at lunch time day after day, hardly eating, just focusing on how to solve this enigma. After a while I just gave up. As a kid I was a loner. The times that I could best socialize was with other kids who didn’t seem to have any friends. I lived pretty much in my own world. In 6th grade my mom had me see a psychiatrist. Soon afterwards for months I was in and out of the local mental hospital. I didn’t really like the psychiatrist and I hated the therapist for a very long time. From age 12 to 14 I was in a boys home in Colorado. In high school I loved Math and German. At one time I wanted to become the next Euler. I spent many hours, sometimes in a mania into the night, trying to solve the hardest mathematical problems that I could find. In tenth grade I was no.1 in the county in mathematics. I would get so obsessed in solving logical problems that it could easily take me 30 minutes to fix a bowl of cereal. When my parents decided to get me on psych drugs, my mathematical abilities took a considerable beating. Looking back it really was all for the better. Computers are going to be doing all that stuff soon. They started beating people in checkers then chess. They were mediocre at GO. Now they beat the grand masters. They cream people in Jeopardy now. They now program as well as an average programmer. Anyone with half a brain should see the obvious here. It appears that the great frontier is now the soul. This journey for about the last 25 years has been thrust upon me. When I was a kid I wanted to help the world. I thought people wanted modern convenience. I thought they wanted better technology. Sometimes technology seems to help us, sometimes it seems to be killing us. I don’t quite know where I’m going in life but for now I deal with occasional akathisia and mania like symptoms. I’ve finally got a psych practitioner that is willing to lower the psych drugs. The big problem I have right now is trying to figure out what to test for so that I can minimize the biological destruction of the psych drugs. My psych practitioner has been reducing my Depakote in 250mg amounts. I have doubts that this is the wisest course of action. I want off the Neuroleptic and the “mood stabilizer” sooner or later but the path looks dangerous and murky. I’ve been on a number of atypical antipsychotics. I don’t have a very high view of them. Supposedly atypical antipsychotics are better than typical antipsychotics but after reading Moncrieff’s “The Bitterest Pills” and having taken Chlorpromazine (Haloperidol was a different beast), I really don’t know for sure if this is just industry spin. The psych drugs hardly did a darn thing about the suicidal ideation except kick the can down the road. Fortunately we found a functional medicine practitioner that did some testing and offered targeted supplements that helped a lot. For a while there I was probably going down the relentless path of getting jacked up with dirty deeds from Mr AC/DC or possibly giving a mortician more business. From what I understand there was a guy here not to long ago who kept saying he was going to kill himself. It’s amazing how some people can predict the future. It may have been plagiarism though. It looks like he had copied an idea that I had previously had a number of times. After coming off some of the drugs, I feel more alive and have more desire to live. Psychiatry severely underestimates the destructive power of psych drugs. A reason may be that it hardly ever takes a dose of its own medicine.
“Remember that common things occur commonly, and uncommon presentations of common things are more common that common presentations of uncommon things.” - this is a gem.
Two points regarding this - first, I think borderline/narcissistic/etc personality 'structure' is a much more useful designation than 'disorder', especially as we know that these structures are devleopmentally derived in adverse environments as then-appropriate and necessary safety and survival strategies, and certianly less stigmatising and adversarial. Second - did you see this paper from last year - "The biopsychosocial model: Its use and abuse" by Roberts? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11019-023-10150-2
This drug (sodium valproate) has been around for a long time and is extensively used in psychiatry. It was invented before epigenetic effects were known, long before gene technology was developed in modern form. Nobody at the time had a clue how it worked, and certainly not at the level described in this paper. On p568, they say: "We have proposed that demethylation might be a critical mechanism in metastasis and that DNA demethylating agents should be avoided when there is a concern for the development of metastasis (29,51). Therefore, the use of VPA and other HDAC inhibitors might be associated with similar problems."
All anticonvulsants have a huge range of side effects but if this one induced cancers or encouraged metastasis (spread), I think it would have become clear by this stage. So far, all they can say is "Be careful, these drugs have unpredictable side effects," which is hardly rocket science.
Drug manufacturers always try to find new uses of their stuff, they can make a tiny change and then get a new patent, which is much easier and cheaper than digging for gold.
I really appreciate you looking into this. It continually bothers me to take drugs that I don’t understand and highly suspect are toxic. My new psych practitioner told me that the Depakote was probably causing blood clotting issues and helped me get off some of it. Right now I’m trying to stabilize. I’ve been on a number of psycho pharmaceuticals for around the last 25 years. There are a number of things that make getting off psych drugs not easy for me. A big problem is not knowing what the drugs are likely doing. If I don’t know what they are doing, it gets hard to do targeted testing. It’s hard to fix what is not known to be broken. Too many people like to tell me that I have nothing to worry about. They tend to look at my concerns about the potential hazards of the psych drugs like such concerns are some kind of unrealistic paranoia or psychosis. Is there any biological process or function in the human body that we are sure either goes unaffected or even benefits from the administration of any patented psycho pharmaceuticals? Here is an article I found online that goes into some of the problems with psych drugs. It is incredibly hard for me to believe that it covers everything. The big Pharma induced information desert on the internet is vast.
https://www.optimallivingdynamics.com/blog/7-important-nutrients-depleted-by-psychiatric-drugs-antidepressants-antipsychotics-stimulants-benzodiazepines-induced-guide-vitamins-medications
I did a search on refseek that said “ The economic underpinnings of a mental health diagnosis “. It was yet another search that came up dry for what I was looking for. For a long time I wondered why I was mentally ill and what I could do to no longer be mentally ill. I saw one time on television a court case that gave me a big clue. Apparently a woman was going into houses uninvited and doing cleaning. When she was brought to court for trespassing, she pleaded insanity. Apparently she was found guilty of trespassing for one reason. She demanded payment for what she was doing. This was the big piece in the puzzle. It started to become clear to me what the drugs and psych hospitalizations were really about. The problem was not really psychiatric, it was economic. All the DSM labels pretty much boiled down to one label-EDD(employment deficit disorder). The most disgusting of things can easily seem like the most amazing of things simply by some cash dished out because of some numbers on a price tag. Mood swings are not really the most desirable thing in the world but if they tend to make people millionaires with lucrative ideas, then all of a sudden people are looking for ways to become bipolar. What I am getting at is that there is a huge financial factor in what gets deemed mental “illness” and I’m not sure very many people are paying attention to it.
This point is not trivial. I have shown that the main reason ECT is used so much is the enormous financial returns it generates for next to no work by the operators. See McLaren N (2017). Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Critical Perspective. Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry 19: 91-104
Similarly, psychiatry has no treatment for personality disorder, so can't make any money from it. I have set out a case arguing that psychiatry is engaged in a massive, long-term program of rediagnosing people with personality disorders as "mentally ill," esp. bipolar disorder, and putting them on drugs for life.
Chapterrs 14-16 in McLaren N (2012). The Mind-Body Problem Explained: The Biocognitive Model for Psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.
This whole real life little house of horrors appears to be packed full of financial factors from top to bottom. However, something very dark and rotten seems to be working in the background. Something is warping the minds and hearts of the mental ward staff and many of the patients. Some patients try to escape the drugs only to run into a dead end and inevitably succumb to the overwhelming narrative. Psych nurses learn to take orders like storm troopers in a Star Wars movie. Patients who do not openly question the narrative of the system tend to get better treatment. Patients who try to reason their way out of taking psych drugs are made to look ignorant or if necessary dismissed as psychotic. In my case, the only people who can get me off psych drugs are psychiatrists and the psychiatrists who are willing to do that are almost always private psychiatrists. Even those psychiatrists can be difficult to find and they are by no means cheap. I must do what I can to stay out of the mental hospital. The psychiatrists in there are nearly always firm dogmatic believers in the almighty pharmaceutical psychotropic. Almost always with the usual psychiatrist, when everything is fine then there is no dose change, if things are not fine then it is time for more “medication”. Rarely are there exceptions. So many psych practitioners have a cold heartedness that seems to defy reasonable understanding. One psych NP basically told me that she prescribes drugs and that is just what she does. There is something in psychiatry that seems to go beyond mere greed. There is something that shuts off the natural part of the heart that feels and shows compassion. It looks like something that goes beyond just something economic. It looks demonic.
See post from June 18th, expands on this theme.
I have some questions, but the questions start with a simple question. Are relationships priceless? If relationships are not priceless, would they by logic not have a price? If relationships have a price, would not the higher priced relationships give better benefits to a person than lower priced relationships? Does real life bear this out? Do the wealthy who spend large sums of money on relationships live happier more fulfilling lives? If real life does not bear this out, if money has nothing to do with a good and healthy relationship or if money has a detrimental effect on relationships, then the question remains, are relationships priceless? If relationships are priceless, why are people profiteering from them?
Tonight I was going into a depression. I tried to see if the staff could help me talk it through. They were too busy to help me much. I found a resident who asked simple questions and listened. From what I can tell, he’s gone through a lot of the same stuff I have. He’s not a professional but he seemed to help me a lot more than the people who were paid to help me and to help the other residents. There may have been a loop in my subconscious telling me that people don’t care. It may be that over the course of my life that loop kept getting reenforced. This may shed some light on where mental disturbance comes from.
Can I quote some of your posts? They make important points. Please reply asap, due to go out in 8hrs.
I went to refseek and searched for “ The psychological effects of mental health propaganda on psychiatric patients “. What it came up with was hardly related to what I was looking for. Apparently no one in academia has even lifted a finger to find out how the messages drummed into mental health patients affect mental health outcomes. For some reason it never dawned on any one in the mental health field that if you told a person that a mental health condition they had was not permanent instead of relentlessly telling them that it was permanent and gave them messages of hope that they could live fairly normal normal lives free of psych drugs instead of relentlessly telling them that they needed psych drugs for the rest of their lives that somehow that could change mental health outcomes. We do it for smoking. We do it for street drugs or alcohol. I’m sure that anyone with a little more than a refrigerator IQ would whole heartedly agree that it works in those instances, but God forbid that we tell anyone on psych drugs something like that. Oh no, we can never give anyone eternally decreed to be psychologically deficient by the psychiatric priesthood such dangerous ideas. I guess it was even fruitless to even look for a paper like that. Who would be crazy enough to publish such anathema.
I'll answer these points in next week's post, they're very important.
https://www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/can-we-please-stop-bullshitting-patients
I found this link on X(twitter). Is SSRI induced sexual dysfunction or any kind of PSSD a factor in the trans movement? I don’t know. From my experience though, psych drugs can easily mess up the head. The culture can also easily mess up people’s heads. People who have post graduate degrees tend to have a huge sway in public opinion. If I say something that looks outside the mainstream narrative, I risk looking crazy. Because I take psych pills, saying something that looks crazy can easily influence psych practitioners to push more psych drugs down my throat (or sometimes into the arm or butt). However, if I can point to a psychiatrist and say “hey, I’m not alone” then I don’t look so crazy anymore. PSSD for me is hard to prove. I was on SSRI’s/SNRI’s for around 20 years (how I was able to get off of them is a bit of a long story) but I don’t know for sure what is or isn’t in my case just old age. One aspect of psych drug related sexual dysfunction that I don’t see addressed much is the relational, social and all too often occupational effects of prolonged psych drug maintenance and with it community stigma and disfunction. Maintenance of psych drugs can easily be devastating to a person’s ability to give back to the community and socialize in a way that develops healthy relationships. When healthy relationships are hard to develop, sexual relationships become very hard to develop. The relational and emotionally cognitive impairments caused by the psych drugs easily, slowly and insidiously box a person into institutionalized settings. The prolonged demand to take substances that are meant to treat mental illness inevitably set up the foundations for a prolonged isolation from society. By all means never become mentally ill, because the cure you are demanded to take will very likely be worse than the disease itself.
The mental hell system is adept at pushing propaganda. I was talking to a guy this morning who thought that he was abnormal because he took psych drugs. Apparently he is a long time veteran of the mental hell system. He heard the same story so many times and had the drugs forced on him for so long that he believed that he was just destined to a life of mental disability. He apparently believed that he was born mentally ill. He did not know who else to blame for this than the Creator of the Universe. The mental hell propaganda isn’t just drilled into the heads of those directly under the filth ridden boot of psychiatry. It is also drilled into the minds of the psych nurses and confirmed when the psych nurses are not taught to distinguish between withdrawal and mental distress (or “illness”) when patients come off the drugs. The “experts”(psych “doctors”) own the narrative in the psych wards and in the general population in regards to psychiatric care. With the narrative comes the power and people all too often underestimate the corruptive nature of power (even the psych “experts” who know they should know better).
https://vimeo.com/260720350
This is a very emotional and inspiring video. If this woman has something to give, I’m sure I must also have something to give. Again, I appreciate that you are responding to my comments. Nearly all psychiatrists are way too busy to be doing what you are doing.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17012225/
What the heck does this mean? I’ve been taking Depakote for years. Is it changing my DNA? Should I be concerned?
I sent the link to my sister in law who has a medical degree. She seems to think that the article is basically saying that Depakote could be used to treat cancer. If this is true, wouldn’t repurposing Depakote for cancer treatment be a huge business opportunity for the makers of Depakote?
I’m in the US in a group home. I have a diagnosis of Bipolar, OCD, High functioning autism (or I guess what used to be Asperger’s) and Schizo-Effective. I think I kind of get what you’re saying about autism. I tried to read Tony Atwood’s “Asperger’s syndrome” a long time ago. Half of it seemed to very much describe me and the other half just didn’t seem to at all. When I was younger my mother would tell me that I had autism. I didn’t get it until I read an article about it in a magazine. The article had a series of faces and said that a normal person can know from seeing those faces what those people are feeling but that the person with autism couldn’t really tell very well. Some of them were easy, but many if not most of them I wasn’t really sure about. At that point, I was pretty sure I had autism. When I was younger, I was in a private religious school. At lunch time the kids would converse. It continually would puzzle me how each kid would know when to speak so that there would be a group conversation going on. I would sit at lunch time day after day, hardly eating, just focusing on how to solve this enigma. After a while I just gave up. As a kid I was a loner. The times that I could best socialize was with other kids who didn’t seem to have any friends. I lived pretty much in my own world. In 6th grade my mom had me see a psychiatrist. Soon afterwards for months I was in and out of the local mental hospital. I didn’t really like the psychiatrist and I hated the therapist for a very long time. From age 12 to 14 I was in a boys home in Colorado. In high school I loved Math and German. At one time I wanted to become the next Euler. I spent many hours, sometimes in a mania into the night, trying to solve the hardest mathematical problems that I could find. In tenth grade I was no.1 in the county in mathematics. I would get so obsessed in solving logical problems that it could easily take me 30 minutes to fix a bowl of cereal. When my parents decided to get me on psych drugs, my mathematical abilities took a considerable beating. Looking back it really was all for the better. Computers are going to be doing all that stuff soon. They started beating people in checkers then chess. They were mediocre at GO. Now they beat the grand masters. They cream people in Jeopardy now. They now program as well as an average programmer. Anyone with half a brain should see the obvious here. It appears that the great frontier is now the soul. This journey for about the last 25 years has been thrust upon me. When I was a kid I wanted to help the world. I thought people wanted modern convenience. I thought they wanted better technology. Sometimes technology seems to help us, sometimes it seems to be killing us. I don’t quite know where I’m going in life but for now I deal with occasional akathisia and mania like symptoms. I’ve finally got a psych practitioner that is willing to lower the psych drugs. The big problem I have right now is trying to figure out what to test for so that I can minimize the biological destruction of the psych drugs. My psych practitioner has been reducing my Depakote in 250mg amounts. I have doubts that this is the wisest course of action. I want off the Neuroleptic and the “mood stabilizer” sooner or later but the path looks dangerous and murky. I’ve been on a number of atypical antipsychotics. I don’t have a very high view of them. Supposedly atypical antipsychotics are better than typical antipsychotics but after reading Moncrieff’s “The Bitterest Pills” and having taken Chlorpromazine (Haloperidol was a different beast), I really don’t know for sure if this is just industry spin. The psych drugs hardly did a darn thing about the suicidal ideation except kick the can down the road. Fortunately we found a functional medicine practitioner that did some testing and offered targeted supplements that helped a lot. For a while there I was probably going down the relentless path of getting jacked up with dirty deeds from Mr AC/DC or possibly giving a mortician more business. From what I understand there was a guy here not to long ago who kept saying he was going to kill himself. It’s amazing how some people can predict the future. It may have been plagiarism though. It looks like he had copied an idea that I had previously had a number of times. After coming off some of the drugs, I feel more alive and have more desire to live. Psychiatry severely underestimates the destructive power of psych drugs. A reason may be that it hardly ever takes a dose of its own medicine.
“Remember that common things occur commonly, and uncommon presentations of common things are more common that common presentations of uncommon things.” - this is a gem.
It's an important principle in medicine and the wider world. Called common sense, as it happens.
Two points regarding this - first, I think borderline/narcissistic/etc personality 'structure' is a much more useful designation than 'disorder', especially as we know that these structures are devleopmentally derived in adverse environments as then-appropriate and necessary safety and survival strategies, and certianly less stigmatising and adversarial. Second - did you see this paper from last year - "The biopsychosocial model: Its use and abuse" by Roberts? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11019-023-10150-2
Yes, structure is a much better expression as it incorporates what the individual was given and also attempts to rectify the problems.
Yes, in touch with the author of that paper.