The recent US Supreme Court approval process for Brett Kavanaugh opened the lid of an earthenware vase marked Trust, when Christine Blasey-Ford stepped forward and said she had been abused by him. The hearings were dramatic. Other dramas never came into the frame. Dr Blasey-Ford had previously been engaged in medical research linked to figures like Alan Schatzberg and Charles Nemeroff – see Children of the Cure.
This post riffs on some of the themes the hearings raised with a little Schatzberg and Nemeroff mixed in.
Abuse and Trust
Do I trust you, can I trust the system, to believe me when I say I have been abused? I have not mentioned this abuse before now. There was no option but to put up with being abused by you, to avert my eyes from you when passing, to clean up any mess quietly.
My speaking up now surprises you.
Like many, I have seemed “reasonable” when a few have ranted about their abuse, been “hysterical” or taken drastic action. The consequences to them have made many of us “reasonable”.
I am also wary about fracturing relationships. I have depended on older white men to look after me in the past. I admire a great deal of what they have done not just for me but for others. Much of the world they have created has brought me great joy.
I have no wish to create a divide with people I know, admire and am inclined to trust on the opposite side, even though others tell me I simply don’t register the “micro-aggressions” coming from across a divide already there.
I hear ever more mention of “trauma”. I am told that an accumulation of setbacks can shorten my life. But neither going into therapy, nor paying someone to help me turn in on myself, nor collectively turning in on ourselves, nor taking pills look like answers to me.
We do need to organize but even though I am black, I am female, I am poorly placed and the Left are even less likely to see me than the Right.
The divides between women and men, blacks and whites, working-class and wealthy, some nations and others, are deep-seated. But I am on the wrong side of an even deeper divide. You are fortunate, I am unfortunate. I am the one who remains stigmatized because the medical sacraments of our day don’t work for me.
And whatever your willingness to reach out to women, blacks, and workers, you flinch from misfortune and from me. You are the cream of society – rich and thick – one of the elect for whom the sacraments work.
It wasn’t always like this. You accepted that all can vote. You abolished slavery. And when you overcame tuberculosis, cholera and leprosy you seemed to have tamed misfortune.
It was the Romans said that money doesn’t smell. You’ll take it whether it comes from women, blacks or campesinos but the Romans wouldn’t take it from lepers, who had to mint their own Dos Centavos as now do I.
You celebrate AIDs now, as though like tuberculosis you overcame it, but this embrace was forced on you by people like me. By then, though, history was no longer on my side.
You are now spooked by any questioning of the weapons you once successfully used against misfortune, as though opening the lid of this earthenware vase will loose demons.
In this most delicate of areas I could trust You once. Now I can’t because whether you are white or black, male or female, from privilege or poverty, you have lost the courage to trust me. This completes my misfortune.
I know that not everyone is believable. I know some of us make things up, and in desperate situations do desperate things. I know that misfortune and adversity don’t make us better or nicer people. But a world in which most of us are not believed can no longer work.
Not being believed diminishes me. Not being able to believe diminishes you.
You have an illness that contaminates me.
You trust in the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine when even the President of the United States, if asked under oath about what’s there, would have to agree most of it is Fake News – and has been for more than thirty years. Why?
Rather than trust yourself or me, you turn to guidelines framed from forgeries. Why?
Hanging together you could demand the data from the trials of drugs you give me – force on me. Instead you hang separately. Why?
Now that you have most of us on 3 or more drugs and life expectancy is falling, what next?
What was that whisper you heard – you ask?
Pandora
Pandora’s box
https://reasonandmeaning.com/2017/03/11/hope-and-pandoras-box/
Chorus: Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?
Prometheus – I stopped mortals from foreseeing their fate.
Chorus – What kind of cure did you discover for this sickness?
Prometheus – I established in them blind hopes.
Chorus – This is a great benefit you gave to men.
Wow! This one has left me totally speechless.
-“You gazed comforting into my eyes, and said: this pill will mend your brain, the unbalance will be gone. Several times you asked me to be patient, it takes weeks for the effect to set in.
As I felt worse, you told me those individuals are also those who respond the best, eventually. Weeks turned into months, and months into years. Very soon I will celebrate the 20th anniversary. Nothing gained, all is lost.
While I spiraled downwards, you stood silent by. Afraid to question the authority, despite your eyes telling you a different story.
This thing that the pill couldn’t cause, strangely unfolded before your eyes.
You can rest on empirical evidence, I’m stuck with the burden of proof. You did what the guidelines tell you, I was left without a manual or advice, not even a warning. I was supposed to, while feeling ill and being desperate to listen to you, somehow see that your knowledge was corrupt?
And now, when I know what I should’ve known then, I should follow your example and be silent?
Yes, I will be silent, but my silence is forced upon me. Nothing like yours, you had a choice, you could’ve stood up and said that there are people who suggest that the pills are to blame.
Your white coat is soiled, and I know that you knew it too. You decieved yourself when you used words only found in the guideline”
Ove2018
Ove – the silencing is horrible it puts even those of us who speakout to some extent as well as the thousands amongst us who don’t ,into another category of ‘us and them’. It never goes away – the symbol used by so many abused and oppressed people is of having a gag over the mouth – said to psychiatrist ‘there is a feeling of electricity over my brain’ – psychiatrist – partronizing kindly smile – message shut up or he will increase the dose- shut up or ‘a spell in hospital will make you feel better – you are mentally ill and these ‘thoughts’ are part of the illness’ – disagree with me the expert on you and you will be shut up – in a hospital ward.
Dear Susanne.
I’m male, standing almost 6’3 (188cm), former “athlete” ~210lbs (100kg), yet I feel so small when trying to get help. It’s as if my character is transparent in their eyes.
At times I also think of the many others abused in mental healthcare over the years, especially women, who can’t defend themselves physically. I could atleast do that if it were ever to be the case.
Benzodiasephines – where are they now, those who were told in the 70’s and 80’s they were harmless? Probably still suffering the effects of the pills, just like me and many others will another 20 years from now.
My “expert”, the senior psychiatrist who prescribed me the Seroxat, has passed away some years ago. He never said a word to me about the ongoing debate over SSRI’s, yet I know, somehow, he must’ve had thoughts about what happened to me.
If he was human, he must’ve.
Post speaks to me about trauma and severed connections. I haven’t been able to feel connected to people the way I used to since losing my health from psych meds and having the profession and others respond in such an awful way. Post makes me feel very sad.
I’ve made progress in trying to focus on what I can do—to set goals. To try to notice examples of goodness that is still present on this earth despite the darkness that is here too.
But the problems w feeling connected to people persists.
“one of the biggest medical scandals ever.”
Christopher Lane
@christophlane
Antidepressant Withdrawal and Patient Safety | Psychology Today (link: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201810/antidepressant-withdrawal-and-patient-safety) psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effe…
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY REPORTS ON THE TWO RECENT PUBLICATIONS THAT SHOW NATIONAL GUIDELINES TO BE DANGEROUSLY INNACURATE
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/side-effects/201810/antidepressant-withdrawal-and-patient-safety
Christopher Lane Ph.D.
Side Effects
Antidepressant Withdrawal and Patient Safety
A new survey provides vital details and requires urgent action.
Posted Oct 15, 2018
Biography
Christopher Lane (www.christopherlane.org) teaches at Northwestern University, where he is a member of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities. A former Guggenheim fellow, awarded the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing, he has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Slate, TIME, and several other newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of six books, most recently Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life (Yale, 2016).
Antidepressant Withdrawal Syndrome
Why SSRI antidepressants often produce a withdrawal syndrome.
Posted Jul 17, 2011
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/side-effects/201107/antidepressant-withdrawal-syndrome
This Paxil Fact File, containing confidential information about one of our most widely prescribed antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications, was drafted and distributed by SmithKline Beecham in 1998 for internal use only. Now GlaxoSmithKline, the drug maker acknowledges in these pages that Paxil/Seroxat causes serious, widespread side effects and withdrawal symptoms—in the February 2001 paper below, it put that number at a staggering 20% of patients. But it continued to press for an FDA license to treat social anxiety disorder (with symptoms including “fear of eating alone in a restaurant”), and advised its staff on how to spin or mask the problem of withdrawal (change the subject or put the side effects “in context”). The FDA awarded the license in March 1999, just a few months after the fact file circulated.
In the BBC Panorama segments below, which aired in Britain on October 3, 2004, David Healy says we may come to see GSK’s masking of data about these withdrawal symptoms as “one of the biggest medical scandals ever.” Senior pharmaceutical regulators in the UK acknowledge they were “disgusted” and “horrified” by the deliberate withholding of information. The President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr. Mike Shooter, argues that the deception “has serious implications for the whole of psychiatry; it has serious implications for the whole of medicine.” An investigative body in Britain met to consider whether to indict the drug maker on criminal charges.
http://www.christopherlane.org/the-paxil-papers/
Christopher Lane – The Paxil Papers ..
Annie .So let’s see what action Psychology Organisations are going to take rather than just publish yet another body of evidence .
Alright, now we’re cooking with gas(lighting).
“You have an illness that contaminates me.” Bingo!
“Not being believed diminishes me. Not being able to believe diminishes you.”
Well said. The irony for many trusting consumers who were unwittingly prescribed SSRIs without Informed Consent is sick and cruel. After the drugs rob them of their previously strong sense of self, abscond with their soul and evaporate their innate spirit, these ADR sufferers are, understandably, less certain about trusting themselves and, out of desperation, put increased and misplaced trust in their chemical captors.
Erasmus’ “Malo accepto stultus sapit” (from bad experiences a fool is made wise), helps many improve their future. But with SSRI-induced akathisia, many “fools” die and, therefore, never have a chance to apply their adverse experiences to improve their future. Perhaps worse still for those left behind, is the tragic realization that their loved ones died without ever knowing the true cause of their bad experiences.
Kristina, your final sentence says it exactly, for me and many other bereaved by prescripticide parents and Carers. My son died, believing his ‘illness’ was inner weakness on his part, some terrible fault in him, something he hadn’t tried hard enough to overcome. A psychiatrist he was unfortunate enough to encounter just twice, briefly, before he died, holding these beliefs, compounded them. I have to block out the memories of this very dear, intelligent, decent human being’s mental and physical agony before he died, which had gone on for years and finally built to a crescendo of hopelessness and akathisic exhaustion. If I didn’t block them out, I couldn’t get through the days left to me. Recently I have met several newly bereaved parents whose story is exactly the same. If our young had died, say, of a cancer, for which the treatment had been gruelling but their nursing care had been empathic, I think one could come to terms with it, terrible though any loss of offspring is. But to see these youngsters killed by medication and most of all, trust in their doctors, whilst we parents/Carers fought to help, understand and keep them alive, is torture, and the horror of it will never be resolved. It is beyond all reason, in a supposedly humane world.
So very true Heather and Kristina. Although not in the same situation as both of you, I too shudder every time that I think back to those very dark days. What does it for me is the memory of the psychiatrist saying, in a very light hearted manner, that there was ‘a young psychiatrist just down the road who is researching the link between rage and Seroxat’. At that exact same time Shane was facing his court appearance and we had no idea on earth of what had happened to the Shane that we formerly knew. The very same psychiatrist also added that ‘were he my son I would be taking him privately for the help that he so desperately needs – AS IT ISN’T AVAILABLE IN THE NHS’. I bet they think that we’ve all forgotten those little quips of theirs, spoken in such a dismissive manner – but how can we? They didn’t just let our children down, they shattered our belief and trust in their profession too. However, it is that loss, of belief and trust, which fires us up I guess – and gives us the energy to fight against that injustice as it continues to filter through from generation to generation.
Heather,
It is–and always will be–incomprehensible that my child’s poisoning, torture and death was made possible by my misguided action of taking Natalie for talk therapy. Other parents whose children died of medicide share similar anguish.
Today we intellectually understand the adverse effects of prescribed poison. But the emotional understanding as we reflect on our yesterdays passed is often unbearable. We relive our children’s adverse drug effects, replay in our minds their final days of life, and forever wonder how it can be possible that we witnessed their slow deaths without either knowing.
Like your child and thousands of others, my child was never told her symptoms were prescription-drug-induced. As the poison and adverse effects increased, Natalie died believing what her prescriber’s incompetence led her to believe: 1. She was very ill. 2. Her symptoms were so varied they didn’t fit into any distinct DSM “disease,” and 3. There was no hope for Natalie nor for her future.
Our children were unique but their deaths are increasingly commonplace. Sometimes when people ask me what my child died of, I just answer “money.”
Kristina,
Our children were unique but their deaths (and psychotropic drug induced destruction) are increasingly common.
This need NOT be so if those who “lead” the Royal College of Psychiatrists and “train” future psychiatrists were actually accountable to our Regulator – The G.M.C.
THE DUTIES OF A DOCTOR REGISTERED WITH THE G.M.C.
The list includes:
“PATIENTS MUST BE ABLE TO TRUST DOCTORS WITH THEIR LIVES AND HEALTH”.
“MAKE THE CARE OF YOUR PATIENT YOUR FIRST CONCERN”.
“PROTECT AND PROMOTE THE HEALTH OF PATIENTS – — ”
“TREAT PATIENTS AS INDIVIDUALS AND RESPECT THEIR DIGNITY”.
“WORK IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PATIENTS: GIVE PATIENTS THE INFORMATION THEY WANT OR NEED — ”
“BE HONEST AND OPEN AND ACT WITH INTEGRITY”.
“NEVER ABUSE YOUR PATIENTS’ TRUST IN YOU, OR THE PUBLIC’S TRUST IN THE PROFESSION”.
“YOU ARE PERSONALLY ACCOUNTABLE FOR YOUR PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE AND MUST ALWAYS BE PREPARED TO JUSTIFY YOUR DECISIONS AND ACTIONS”.
When our adult child was subject to shameful misdiagnosis of AKATHISIA, then repeatedly incarcerated for misdiagnosed ADRs to their endless, enforced cascade of multi-systems injuries via psychotropic drug poisoning: –
It was terrifying to witness their apparent, arrogant contempt for these basic professional duties, and to realise that they appeared totally immune to any personal, professional accountability.
Tim and Mary,
Thanks for your postings. Such well-said and important points. I hope one day the general public is more aware of systemic corruption and failings. Far too many have learned of such the hard way via adverse, and oft fatal, experiences.
Fine words, Tim.
It all comes right back down to everything that has been said on DH blog and RxISK for over six years.
To Whom is any Doctor Accountable?
No one it seems..
Having just about got my head switched on, instead of off, these Doctors seem to make up the rules as they go along.
In my experience my rural GP surgery didn’t know a NICE Guideline from a hole in the ground.
So, NICE Guidelines for all their, Junkness, at that time, were irrelevant.
We all know how they are messing about with dangerous drugs and how so many of their patients have not lived to tell their tale..
There is no conscience, when deliberate oppositions comes your way.
Win any argument over the patient at any cost to the patient.
It is almost FORBIDDEN to raise a complaint and get some serious answers.
They come back with time limitations, they come back with a total lack of willingness to discuss, they come back with basically nothing to alleviate the horror they have inflicted.
No doctors surgery will risk getting involved in something which should, by law, make them accountable.
Too risky to lose out to may be just one patient who might just create a maelstrom and upset their apple cart ..
There are no rules for how doctors operate, I have seen that very clearly for myself as have most of us.
The GMC, as I see it, will never involve themselves in a patients’ death from SSRIs, or similar.
I did the whole nine yards thing of formal complaint, seeking out a lawyer to try and sue them, trying to use the Ombudsman which completely backfired, went to my MP, wrote to Richard Brook of MIND, wrote to the MHRA, battled away to no avail.
I nearly wrote to Andrew Witty, I was so appalled at the whole mess that the doctors had got me in to and I may say the GP was so verbally rude and out of order that that might have been enough to send anyone over the edge, let alone some one acutely akathisiatic from Seroxat.
The RCGP are trying very hard to turn the tables about patient complaints.
Basically, if you complain you are a pest and you might make your doctor suicidal.
There are vast numbers of people incredibly upset, like you and me and parents who have lost their children in full knowledge of why and who and when and wrong.
Even the best brains in the business, have no solutions to this Rubic Cube as it twists and turns.
If there was just a little light at the end of the tunnel, how much better would everyone feel.
It’s hard work, Tim, and I am struck by immature and ignoble people who should know better in high places making a mockery … and that really offends. Really, really offends…
Tim, the jury’s not out on what may happen, the jury’s out on the Grassy Knolls …
Thanks Annie.
The General Medical Council.
“We help to protect patients and improve medical education and practice in the UK by setting standards for students and doctors. We support them in achieving and exceeding these standards, and take action when they are not met”.
“We have five core organisational values underpinning everything we do”.
*INTEGRITY. *EXCELLENCE. *COLLABORATION. *FAIRNESS.
*TRANSPARENCY.
“See our CORPORATE STRATEGY for more information on our MISSION, our VISION, and our plans for 2018 to 2020.
Psychiatry is a pseudoscience, a drug racket, and a means of social control. It’s 21st Century Phrenology, with potent neuro-toxins. Psychiatry has done, and continues to do, far more harm than good. The DSM is nothing more than a catalog of billing codes. ALL of the bogus “diagnoses” in it were INVENTED, none were discovered. So-called “mental illnesses” are exactly as “real” as presents from Santa Claus, but not more real. But it’s the drugs racket aspect of psychiatry that did the most damage to me. They stole what could and should have been the best 20 years of my life. If I knew then what I know now, I would never have gone to a psych, or taken their poison pills. Yes, I do realize there are *SOME* folks who claim that the psychs & psych drugs helped them. Maybe so. But they are the distinct minority. Greed and hubris are the “evil twins” legacy of the psychs & PhRMA….