Ronald Pies is one of those pseudointellectual gimps that will always try to convey some sort of august culture and deep learning.
Of course sycophants that really wish they were more than glorified drug-pushers love to genuflect before this edifice of self-importance.
As long as there's clinicians who think a side-order of Buddhism or existentialism will elevate their grift there will always be a need for clowns like Pies.
I used to read Psychiatric Times regularly for years and remember when they suddenly did a 180 on the chemical imbalance theory. It was a WTF moment. They denied ever having believed it or said it and claimed it was a marketing strategy to explain depression to the moron masses. I did my undergrad and PhD in Psychology in the 90s at a very prestigious ancient University in UK. My undergrad degree was heavy on psychopharmacology and biological psychology so we were taught a lot of the chemical imbalance models of depression and schizophrenia. Our lecturers did animal model research on Parkinson's disease and other wet brain research. Hardly the moron masses.
I was under care of my community mental health team in my late 30s and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The psychiatrist said I also had "repressed anxiety" because I denied feeling anxious! I have not suffered from ruminative thoughts or anxious thoughts but have always had a fast heart rate and highish blood pressure (even when I was an amateur athlete as a teen), and that plus me gripping the arms of the chair in my assessment led to her saying I also had anxiety. When I denied being anxious she said it was repressed anxiety.
She obviously didn't take a proper history. Perhaps her manner caused chair gripping, they don't consider that.
Phil Hickey contributed to Mad in America for years, excellent critical work but had to retire due to illness. There's always room for critical analysis.
My psychiatrist was a delight. At my 1st appointment after assessment she told me that she googled me and had a good laugh at my research. A few months in she shouted at me never to mention side effects ever again because quetiapine has no side effects. That quetiapine left me with permanent severe restless leg syndrome and the pramipexole caused a psychotic episode resulting in a 12 day hospitalisation - my only time ever in hospital for anything.
She had also put me on sertraline which did nothing but give me a migraine and nausea for the 9 months I was on it. She gave me a 2 week prescription of it when I said I wanted off of it. Luckily my GP said she'd write the prescription for as long as I needed to come off it. Took 2 1/2 months. Had terrible electric shocks. Later my psychiatrist mentioned the sertraline and I said it didn't do anything but give me a 9 month migraine. She said "I wished I'd known that" 😳 I wonder why she didn't know that.
Sertraline is the only medication I struggled to stop. Came of quetiapine twice cold turkey with less issues (it was bad for a few days but resolved after a week).
I was put on pregabalin for the RLS. Psychiatrist decided I needed trazadone to help me sleep. I didn't have sleep problems, I just went to be at 9pm and got up at 3 or 4am to start work. The hospital insisted I couldn't go to bed until after 1030pm. Trazadone interacted badly with the pregabalin and made me so dizzy I couldn't even stand up and would feel like i'd projectile vomit. I complained about it a couple of times and psychiatrist said she'd stop the pregabalin instead. She didn't believe RLS was a real thing. I panicked and stopped the trazadone, kept refilling the prescription but not taking it, and never mentioned it again. I felt like I was being blackmailed.
I did get my neurologist to independently write a prescription for part of the pregabalin to try and block my psychiatrist from just stopping it. I'm just glad I'm out that system now
A hero, Ignaz Semmelweiss, hounded by the medical establishment for recommending basic hygiene, wash your hands between patients, the cheek of it, to the point he ended himself in an asylum. And that was before the plague of Big Pharma. Ivan IIlich wrote at length on "disabling professions"...and before him B.Shaw:" All professions are an assault on the laity." So it goes.
Agreed. Adam Smith wrote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." Working out how to gouge the public always causes merriment.
They did that with ECT in Norway. Only registered state hospitals can give it, not private shrinks. There is an 8 week waiting list for it, so hardly anybody is referred. Same in WA years ago with stimulants for children: Health dept required the psychiatrist to ring for an approval number and often kept them waiting. Numbers of kids on these drugs plummeted, first time in history. Some years later after constant agitation from the astroturf groups, they dropped the approval number and so prescription rates went through the roof again. A very valuable naturalistic experiment.
The Nordic countries are surprising barbaric in their mental institutions, for societies that are trend-making Humanistic in almost everything else.
I suppose if it was State-lead social-welfare research, fx by the NHS, all the American rightwingers would be shrieking about the dangers non-stop. But not when small numbers of people stand to make private fortunes, and it's largely the socially powerless and marginalised who are paying the price - and "lefties" care about those.
There's plenty of "Rightwing Christian" families who just wanted their energetic kid to be a bit more patient but watched as the drugs destroyed them - fortunately THEIR media calls Big Harma "liberal", so soon enough it's the liberals they are hating again rather than the corporations and the drugs.
For many, anyway.
Shame there isn't a decent 'citizenstv' where such issues can be shared by locals, along with footage and testimonials.
The worst thing is, the people who ran this campaign and became extraordinarily wealthy from it, will never face justice of any kind.
I always said that if GPs had to fill out 8 different forms, by hand, that couldn't be copy and pasted, then GPs would rarely prescribe antibiotics. If GPs think they are being bullied by patients into prescribing antibiotics then there is nothing like admin hell as a good antidote to patient pressure.
Psychiatrists should have to fill out 8 forms to prescribe antipsychotics in outpatients, and 20 forms for LAIs. I felt that, here in the UK, the moment antipsychotics were indicated for bipolar disorder psychiatrists practically had a celebration party. I was told there was only a choice between aripiprazole, valproate (which I wasn't allowed without an IUD), or lithium.
"Practically"? I think that should be "DEFINITELY"!
Of course, because now they could help a whole new group of people (cough cough), not because they had a new captive market to get wealthy dealing their poisons to.
I tried a mate's lithium for 3 days for a laugh, just to see what it was like (Something that 'Psychiatrists' have a religious injunction against, which is strange... it's well known that student doctors hit their pharmacopia during student parties, but not psychiatrists. It's almost like they know this shit is toxic from day one.).
It was one of the worst psychic experiences I've ever had. It was like a blanket of depression slowly seeping into my brain, grabbing my neck stem, and making everything grim. One and only trial of this crap, stopped in 3 days, never ever to be repeated.
I TOTALLY like the idea of 8+ forms to slow the process down, especially if as Niall said ALL the negatives and downsides are listed during the process.
Parents looking forward to being grandparents might take the hassle of a "hyperactive" child rather than risk not becoming grandparents due to the side-effects.
Thanks, Niall. Like you, I am frustrated that psychiatry espouses a biopsychosocial model, yet much of what is practised is bio-bio. Like you, I find that listening carefully and looking for antecedents or causal factors mostly leads to answers. Often, the answer lies within the relational context; human distress often arises from relationships. Antidepressants don't address the systemic issues. Sadly, however, the larger systemic issue, the frightening state of the world, as you have detailed here, is beyond us.
Ronald Pies is one of those pseudointellectual gimps that will always try to convey some sort of august culture and deep learning.
Of course sycophants that really wish they were more than glorified drug-pushers love to genuflect before this edifice of self-importance.
As long as there's clinicians who think a side-order of Buddhism or existentialism will elevate their grift there will always be a need for clowns like Pies.
I used to read Psychiatric Times regularly for years and remember when they suddenly did a 180 on the chemical imbalance theory. It was a WTF moment. They denied ever having believed it or said it and claimed it was a marketing strategy to explain depression to the moron masses. I did my undergrad and PhD in Psychology in the 90s at a very prestigious ancient University in UK. My undergrad degree was heavy on psychopharmacology and biological psychology so we were taught a lot of the chemical imbalance models of depression and schizophrenia. Our lecturers did animal model research on Parkinson's disease and other wet brain research. Hardly the moron masses.
I was under care of my community mental health team in my late 30s and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The psychiatrist said I also had "repressed anxiety" because I denied feeling anxious! I have not suffered from ruminative thoughts or anxious thoughts but have always had a fast heart rate and highish blood pressure (even when I was an amateur athlete as a teen), and that plus me gripping the arms of the chair in my assessment led to her saying I also had anxiety. When I denied being anxious she said it was repressed anxiety.
She obviously didn't take a proper history. Perhaps her manner caused chair gripping, they don't consider that.
Phil Hickey contributed to Mad in America for years, excellent critical work but had to retire due to illness. There's always room for critical analysis.
My psychiatrist was a delight. At my 1st appointment after assessment she told me that she googled me and had a good laugh at my research. A few months in she shouted at me never to mention side effects ever again because quetiapine has no side effects. That quetiapine left me with permanent severe restless leg syndrome and the pramipexole caused a psychotic episode resulting in a 12 day hospitalisation - my only time ever in hospital for anything.
She had also put me on sertraline which did nothing but give me a migraine and nausea for the 9 months I was on it. She gave me a 2 week prescription of it when I said I wanted off of it. Luckily my GP said she'd write the prescription for as long as I needed to come off it. Took 2 1/2 months. Had terrible electric shocks. Later my psychiatrist mentioned the sertraline and I said it didn't do anything but give me a 9 month migraine. She said "I wished I'd known that" 😳 I wonder why she didn't know that.
Sertraline is the only medication I struggled to stop. Came of quetiapine twice cold turkey with less issues (it was bad for a few days but resolved after a week).
I was put on pregabalin for the RLS. Psychiatrist decided I needed trazadone to help me sleep. I didn't have sleep problems, I just went to be at 9pm and got up at 3 or 4am to start work. The hospital insisted I couldn't go to bed until after 1030pm. Trazadone interacted badly with the pregabalin and made me so dizzy I couldn't even stand up and would feel like i'd projectile vomit. I complained about it a couple of times and psychiatrist said she'd stop the pregabalin instead. She didn't believe RLS was a real thing. I panicked and stopped the trazadone, kept refilling the prescription but not taking it, and never mentioned it again. I felt like I was being blackmailed.
I did get my neurologist to independently write a prescription for part of the pregabalin to try and block my psychiatrist from just stopping it. I'm just glad I'm out that system now
A hero, Ignaz Semmelweiss, hounded by the medical establishment for recommending basic hygiene, wash your hands between patients, the cheek of it, to the point he ended himself in an asylum. And that was before the plague of Big Pharma. Ivan IIlich wrote at length on "disabling professions"...and before him B.Shaw:" All professions are an assault on the laity." So it goes.
Agreed. Adam Smith wrote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." Working out how to gouge the public always causes merriment.
Easy way to end all "antidepressant" handouts - make all costs come from the psychiatrists personal pocket.
Funny thing is, tons of real doctors would still prescribe essential drugs for their most needy patients, even under such conditions.
The only psychiatrists who would do the same as the real psychos who enjoy the suffering they cause.
Says everything.
They did that with ECT in Norway. Only registered state hospitals can give it, not private shrinks. There is an 8 week waiting list for it, so hardly anybody is referred. Same in WA years ago with stimulants for children: Health dept required the psychiatrist to ring for an approval number and often kept them waiting. Numbers of kids on these drugs plummeted, first time in history. Some years later after constant agitation from the astroturf groups, they dropped the approval number and so prescription rates went through the roof again. A very valuable naturalistic experiment.
The Nordic countries are surprising barbaric in their mental institutions, for societies that are trend-making Humanistic in almost everything else.
I suppose if it was State-lead social-welfare research, fx by the NHS, all the American rightwingers would be shrieking about the dangers non-stop. But not when small numbers of people stand to make private fortunes, and it's largely the socially powerless and marginalised who are paying the price - and "lefties" care about those.
There's plenty of "Rightwing Christian" families who just wanted their energetic kid to be a bit more patient but watched as the drugs destroyed them - fortunately THEIR media calls Big Harma "liberal", so soon enough it's the liberals they are hating again rather than the corporations and the drugs.
For many, anyway.
Shame there isn't a decent 'citizenstv' where such issues can be shared by locals, along with footage and testimonials.
The worst thing is, the people who ran this campaign and became extraordinarily wealthy from it, will never face justice of any kind.
I always said that if GPs had to fill out 8 different forms, by hand, that couldn't be copy and pasted, then GPs would rarely prescribe antibiotics. If GPs think they are being bullied by patients into prescribing antibiotics then there is nothing like admin hell as a good antidote to patient pressure.
Psychiatrists should have to fill out 8 forms to prescribe antipsychotics in outpatients, and 20 forms for LAIs. I felt that, here in the UK, the moment antipsychotics were indicated for bipolar disorder psychiatrists practically had a celebration party. I was told there was only a choice between aripiprazole, valproate (which I wasn't allowed without an IUD), or lithium.
"Practically"? I think that should be "DEFINITELY"!
Of course, because now they could help a whole new group of people (cough cough), not because they had a new captive market to get wealthy dealing their poisons to.
I tried a mate's lithium for 3 days for a laugh, just to see what it was like (Something that 'Psychiatrists' have a religious injunction against, which is strange... it's well known that student doctors hit their pharmacopia during student parties, but not psychiatrists. It's almost like they know this shit is toxic from day one.).
It was one of the worst psychic experiences I've ever had. It was like a blanket of depression slowly seeping into my brain, grabbing my neck stem, and making everything grim. One and only trial of this crap, stopped in 3 days, never ever to be repeated.
I TOTALLY like the idea of 8+ forms to slow the process down, especially if as Niall said ALL the negatives and downsides are listed during the process.
Parents looking forward to being grandparents might take the hassle of a "hyperactive" child rather than risk not becoming grandparents due to the side-effects.
The evolution of every field is sparked by critical discussion. It is essential.
Thanks, Niall. Like you, I am frustrated that psychiatry espouses a biopsychosocial model, yet much of what is practised is bio-bio. Like you, I find that listening carefully and looking for antecedents or causal factors mostly leads to answers. Often, the answer lies within the relational context; human distress often arises from relationships. Antidepressants don't address the systemic issues. Sadly, however, the larger systemic issue, the frightening state of the world, as you have detailed here, is beyond us.