In the attempt to convince people to take medications, the hazards of such medications are often minimized or overlooked. While many people may truly be better off taking some medications, at least for awhile, the danger in hiding the hazards of the drugs is that rational decisions about how long to stay on medications, at what dosage, and how hard to try to find alternatives, become impossible. Instead, an illusion is created that the only rational approach is to stay on medications indefinitely, because only an irrational person would risk the return of a destructive psychosis.
If we really allowed ourselves to face all the facts however, we would see that these decisions are much more complex. For example, while the effects of being caught up in psychosis can be terrible, the effects of the antipsychotic medications can be terrible as well. These medications significantly increase the risk of death, due to causing things like heart problems, metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes etc. And, while most of psychiatry is still in denial about it, it appears that antipsychotic medications have a tendency to shrink brains. (For those of you unfamiliar with the evidence for this effect, I include some references and other information at the end of this post.)
Some people might think that if antipsychotic medications will shrink the consumer’s brain and then possibly kill them, then the obvious decision is to just get off the medications as quickly as possible. However, the problem is that it appears that uncontrolled psychosis, and its associated distress, will also shrink a person’s brain and very possibly kill them (besides making a total mess of their life in other ways.) People with uncontrolled psychosis may become socially isolated, eat very poorly, become inactive, use unhealthy substances as part of coping, and generally be chronically stressed and hopeless, which leads to premature aging and damage to the brain, and earlier death.
(It should be noted that it has been found that brain shrinkage due to chronic stress can often be reversed once the stress is removed. The same may be true of brain shrinkage due to antipsychotic use.)
(Also, note that in contrast to what psychiatry tends to claim, I am not saying that “mental illness” such as “schizophrenia” will shrink a person’s brain. There is little evidence that the brain changes and shrinkage frequently observed in people diagnosed with “schizophrenia” (prior to use of antipsychotic medications) is significantly different than that found in people who have been chronically traumatized for example. This distinction is important, because while a person who fears their brain is shrinking due to “schizophrenia” may have no clue what to do to stop it, other than taking drugs which also cause shrinkage, a person who sees the connection with stress and trauma can work toward psychological healing and a healthy lifestyle.)
So, if both uncontrolled psychosis, and the medications used to treat it, can both shrink a person’s brain and kill them, what does it make sense to do?
There is a third possibility, which is real recovery, or getting to a state where one is not psychotic or likely to become psychotic and also not taking medications. It makes sense to re-orient everyone in the mental health field toward the pursuit of this possibility, as only this third state contains freedom from risk of brain shrinkage and early death.
While this can be the long term goal, what can a person do in the short term? I believe the best approach is to beware of both psychosis and of antipsychotic medications. In practice, for someone prone to psychosis while off medications, this might mean being willing to use a modest amount of antipsychotic medication in the short term, while continually working to become more healthy & to make any further use of medication unnecessary. It would mean being willing to take risks from time to time with cautious medication reductions, risking a return of psychosis, in order to get practice learning how to cope with one’s mind while on less medication, and working toward getting off it completely.
For the mental health system, taking up this perspective would be acknowledging that using antipsychotics to fight psychosis is like fighting fire with fire. It does make sense at times to fight fire with fire at times (forest firefighters do it occasionally, when they light “backfires”) but it is also highly dangerous, and other methods should be used whenever possible. Mental health workers need to be trained in helping people overcome psychosis and tendencies toward psychosis using tools other than antipsychotic medications. They should be trained to prefer using these other tools whenever possible, using antipsychotic medications only when truly necessary. And then, even when consumers end up depending for awhile on these medications, mental health workers should be ready to explain why it is better to avoid long term dependence and to help people work out ways toward a full recovery where further dependence becomes unnecessary.
Even with the best possible mental health system, it may well be that not everyone would be able to make the kind of full recovery where they would no longer need medication to reduce the risk of psychosis. However, at least everyone would be getting the best possible chance at that outcome. Given the real facts about the risks of antipsychotic medications, and the possibility of recovering to a state where they are not needed, it is important that people be given that chance.
Evidence that antipsychotic medications shrink brains:
The New York Times last year interviewed a prominent psychiatrist who has been doing brain scans over 18 years, and has found clear evidence of brain shrinkage proportional to antipsychotic drug use. Below is a link to the interview, and an excerpt from the interview that discusses the shrinkage:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/health/research/16conv.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1
“In 1989, I began to collect subjects — some with schizophrenia and some not — and began taking pictures of their brains. With the schizophrenics, we began seeing them at the first onset of their disease, which is usually at around age 24. We recruited about 538 people with schizophrenia. Eighteen years later, we’re still following 305.
Q. AND WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND?
A. I haven’t published this yet. But I have spoken about it in public lectures. The big finding is that people with schizophrenia are losing brain tissue at a more rapid rate than healthy people of comparable age. Some are losing as much as 1 percent per year. That’s an awful lot over an 18-year period. And then we’re trying to figure out why. Another thing we’ve discovered is that the more drugs you’ve been given, the more brain tissue you lose.
Q. WHY DO YOU THINK THIS IS HAPPENING?
A. Well, what exactly do these drugs do? They block basal ganglia activity. The prefrontal cortex doesn’t get the input it needs and is being shut down by drugs. That reduces the psychotic symptoms. It also causes the prefrontal cortex to slowly atrophy.”
*********************
Some might argue that those getting more medication might “really” be those who have a worse case of “schizophrenia” and that this is why they have more brain shrinkage. However, this argument cannot explain why monkeys given antipsychotic medication also have brain shrinkage, as discussed in the abstracts below:
The Influence of Chronic Exposure to Antipsychotic Medications on Brain Size before and after Tissue Fixation: A Comparison of Haloperidol and Olanzapine in Macaque Monkeys
Karl-Anton Dorph-Petersen1, Joseph N Pierri1, James M Perel1,2, Zhuoxin Sun3, Allan R Sampson3 and David A Lewis1,4
1. 1Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2. 2Department of Clinical Pharmacology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
3. 3Department of Statistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
4. 4Department of Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Correspondence: Dr DA Lewis, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, 3811 O’Hara Street, W1651 BST, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. Tel: +1 412 624 3934; Fax: +1 412 624 9910; E-mail: lewisda@msx.upmc.edu
Received 13 September 2004; Revised 11 January 2005; Accepted 18 January 2005; Published online 9 March 2005.
Abstract
It is unclear to what degree antipsychotic therapy confounds longitudinal imaging studies and post-mortem studies of subjects with schizophrenia. To investigate this problem, we developed a non-human primate model of chronic antipsychotic exposure. Three groups of six macaque monkeys each were exposed to oral haloperidol, olanzapine or sham for a 17–27 month period. The resulting plasma drug levels were comparable to those seen in subjects with schizophrenia treated with these medications. After the exposure, we observed an 8–11% reduction in mean fresh brain weights as well as left cerebrum fresh weights and volumes in both drug-treated groups compared to sham animals. The differences were observed across all major brain regions (frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, and cerebellum), but appeared most robust in the frontal and parietal regions. Stereological analysis of the parietal region using Cavalieri’s principle revealed similar volume reductions in both gray and white matter. In addition, we assessed the subsequent tissue shrinkage due to standard histological processing and found no evidence of differential shrinkage due to drug exposure. However, we observed a pronounced general shrinkage effect of 20% and a highly significant variation in shrinkage across brain regions. In conclusion, chronic exposure of non-human primates to antipsychotics was associated with reduced brain volume. Antipsychotic medication may confound post-mortem studies and longitudinal imaging studies of subjects with schizophrenia that depend upon volumetric measures.
http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v30/n9/abs/1300710a.html
Effect of Chronic Exposure to Antipsychotic Medication on Cell Numbers in the Parietal Cortex of Macaque Monkeys
Glenn T Konopaske1, Karl-Anton Dorph-Petersen1,2, Joseph N Pierri1, Qiang Wu3, Allan R Sampson3 and David A Lewis1,4
1. 1Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2. 2Center for Basic Psychiatric Research, Aarhus University Psychiatric Hospital, Århus, Denmark
3. 3Department of Statistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
4. 4Department of Neuroscience, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Correspondence: Dr DA Lewis, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, 3811 O’Hara Street, W1650 BST Biomedical Science Tower, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. Tel: +1 412 624 3934; Fax: +1 412 624 9910; E-mail: lewisda@upmc.edu
Received 8 May 2006; Revised 29 August 2006; Accepted 15 September 2006; Published online 25 October 2006.
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Abstract
Both in vivo and post-mortem investigations have demonstrated smaller volumes of the whole brain and of certain brain regions in individuals with schizophrenia. It is unclear to what degree such smaller volumes are due to the illness or to the effects of antipsychotic medication treatment. Indeed, we recently reported that chronic exposure of macaque monkeys to haloperidol or olanzapine, at doses producing plasma levels in the therapeutic range in schizophrenia subjects, was associated with significantly smaller total brain weight and volume, including an 11.8–15.2% smaller gray matter volume in the left parietal lobe. Consequently, in this study we sought to determine whether these smaller volumes were associated with lower numbers of the gray matter’s constituent cellular elements. The use of point counting and Cavalieri’s principle on Nissl-stained sections confirmed a 14.6% smaller gray matter volume in the left parietal lobe from antipsychotic-exposed monkeys. Use of the optical fractionator method to estimate the number of each cell type in the gray matter revealed a significant 14.2% lower glial cell number with a concomitant 10.2% higher neuron density. The numbers of neurons and endothelial cells did not differ between groups. Together, the findings of smaller gray matter volume, lower glial cell number, and higher neuron density without a difference in total neuron number in antipsychotic-exposed monkeys parallel the results of post-mortem schizophrenia studies, and raise the possibility that such observations in schizophrenia subjects might be due, at least in part, to antipsychotic medication effects.
http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v32/n6/abs/1301233a.html
On the ICSPP email list, I received a response to this post from Ben Hansen, the author of the http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/ website. Ben’s comment is below, followed by my comment on it:
I’m not convinced psychosis is evil. I think of psychosis as part of
a natural healing process which, when allowed to unfold in a caring
and safe environment, results in a stronger, wiser and wholly-mended
soul. Sometimes I think of psychosis as functioning like a circuit
breaker; the breaker is designed to shut everything down when a
circuit is dangerously overloaded — this does not mean the breaker
has malfunctioned in any way. Quite the contrary.
Where’s the evidence that psychosis shrinks the brain? How have you
reached this conclusion?
There are two books I highly recommend on this subject:
Trials of the Visionary Mind, by John Weir Perry.
The Seduction of Madness: Revolutionary Insights into the World of
Psychosis and a Compassionate Approach to Recovery at Home, by Edward
M. Podvoll.
Ben
Hi Ben,
The subject of good and evil is a tricky one – there is usually some evil in that which goes by the name of good, and vice versa. I do agree with you that going through psychosis in a caring and safe environment can result in an outcome such as you describe, and I’ve read and very much appreciated both the books you mention. But I don’t think of psychosis as in itself a “healing process,” Instead I think of it as a process of being kind of lost and floundering, While this in itself is not “healing” it can actually be a step up from being totally stuck in a bad place – because in all the floundering (especially if one has safety and support offered from others) one might well find one’s way to somewhere better than the old stuck bad place. It’s finding the way to a new place, that isn’t the old stuck place and isn’t psychotic, that is healing.
In terms of your analogy, the “circuit breaker” of psychosis is a way to get unstuck, and maybe is “supposed” to happen – but if the person never finds their way to a better place, then life can be pretty bleak. As it is for some people I’ve met who have resisted medications for years and just stayed stuck in psychosis itself.
There is plenty of evidence that stress & traumatic stress shrinks the brain. There is also evidence that people who are headed into psychosis often have brain shrinkage even before they start medications – the establishment would say this is from the “illness” but I believe it is from the stress that they are stuck in. Because when people are in a stuck place, or floundering in psychosis, they are pretty stressed.
When people are caught up in psychosis, they tend to create vicious circles of more stress and then more psychotic reactions in response. (And the way others in our society react to them tends to feed these cycles.) All of which is likely bad for people’s brains, and likely to lead to early mortality.
So while I would totally agree with approaches like Diabasis where people are supported in working through their psychosis, I also think that when our best approaches aren’t working or aren’t available, it does make sense to think of using antipsychotics as possibly a lesser evil in some situations, though the goal should be to get past both them and the psychosis. Anyway, that’s my thinking.
Ron Unger
“some people I’ve met who have resisted medications for years and just stayed stuck in psychosis itself.”
We are all going to die one day . You claim the NONpsychotic life is better than a psychotic one. The psychotic person might claim your life is/was too dull. He/she who has power enforces the rules of what normal is.
A reason(feeling) to live is what people are looking for. Living and feeling useful to ones group.
Without this meaning we would likely be depressed, living in a pointless existance.
I think it depends on whether living with psychosis is experienced as a strain or not. Some people do all right, even though they experience “symptoms” of “psychosis”. For others it’s a nightmare, inevitably implying a somewhat high stress level, that wears them out over time.
It’s like you suggest in this clip from a talk on CBT for “psychosis”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syClu_0m4bI, the border between “normal” and “psychotic” is rather blurred, with “psychosis” lying on a continuum with “normality” as an extreme form of “normality”. Some people get stressed out and worn out, dying from a heart attack at the age of 45 although they seem perfectly “normal”, and show no “symptoms” of “psychosis”. Others deal with hearing voices and stuff, and still have a great quality of life.
Ideally, everybody should be given the support they need to recover (Soteria, Diabasis, Windhorse, etc.). As long as this support isn’t available to everybody, it should be the individual’s choice whether s/he wants to resort to neuroleptics or not.
Another thought: Social support maybe is just as if not more important than drugs. Housing, and as Mark suggests, some sort of job.
Here in Denmark the problem isn’t as big as in the U.S. Although the welfare-state isn’t any longer what it once was, there are very few cracks in the social security system you could fall through. BUT: I have a friend who is on disability (labelled with “schizophrenia”). He lives in a tiny square concrete one-room-apartment (right around the corner of the psych-ER, by the way, yikes!) at a huge square concrete apartment block, built around a square carefully crew-cut lawn – the gardener efficiently sees to that not one single daisy dares to unfold a flower, and with a view on – right! other huge square concrete apartment blocks, the apartments mostly inhabited by single men, which means no plants, not to mention flowers, on any of the square concrete balconies. Edifying! I once visited for an entire weekend. I was about to go square-concrete-nutz… You could call it nature deprivation, something. An assault on (human) nature. With Derrick Jensen in mind, I’d say it is traumatizing. It isn’t even a toxic mimicry of nature. It is the exact opposite of nature. How anyone is supposed to thrive in such an environment is a mystery to me. Not to mention that an environment like that would have any healing qualities…
I agree with Mark and Marian, I really should have written that it is the distress which is often related to psychosis that is, if chronic, bad for people’s health and bad for their brain. This distress typically results both from the reactions of others to those with psychosis (who become coercive, or just make distance), and what is commonly the reaction of the person with psychosis to their own experience – being scared of their experience, trying to get rid of their experience, and making poor decisions. If a person is surrounded by supportive others, and helped to make peace with their experience, then just the fact that the experience is weird or different is not not intrinsically bad for someone’s health. In fact, as Mark says, it may make one’s life more interesting and meaningful.
Psychosis is often defined as “being out of touch with reality” but in some sense this is actually impossible – we can never get out of reality, so we are always in touch with some aspect of it. After all, even the ostrich with its head in the sand is very much in touch with the sand, And sometimes it is “normal” people who have their head in the sand, not wanting to hear the viewpoint of anyone who pulled their head out…..
I think though that when people’s experience is just different, and the person is able to manage their life without major distress, then one really isn’t justified in calling it “psychosis” anymore. It’s now just creativity or spiritual or lifestyle difference, which really isn’t a mental health issue anymore. And people often find that their unique differences, and their unique ways of relating to life, are extremely valuable to them. These unique patterns are sometimes first experienced as scary and disorganized, or as psychosis, but then can be integrated, if the person can be helped to accept them and not just drug them away. So what we really want to do is help people achieve that kind of integration, and not be stuck in either the scary and disorganized state, or the drugged into indifference state.
I am posting below the response made on an email list, by another writer who has given me permission to post it here. His comment is followed by my response to his comment:
Ron,
I think the message that you posted on your blog is very helpful in proposing a way of using medication as an adjunct to other approaches to recovery, i.e. using it as part of treatment but not as the primary approach to treatment.
I see psychotic breaks as partly protective moves by the psyche and partly an effort to “reconstitute the self” in the words of John Weir Perry. It is significant that the first psychotic break typically occurs just as a person is facing the task of moving into adulthood with all of its pressures and demands. It makes sense that people who have suffered trauma, who have deep feelings of inadequacy and have been hurt enough by human beings so that they want nothing to do with them would be terrified by the prospect of having to join and participate in the adult world.
So the psychotic break can be seen as a somewhat creative way of dealing with the stress and desperation of dealing with the world. Worse things could happen – suicide, homicide, mayhem, destruction. So I see the psychotic break as being functional and this is why it is so important for “healers” to help people go through the break rather than cut it off. Now when I say “go through it” I’m not talking about a process that takes several months or even several years. We’re talking about a longer process fraught with one step forward, two steps back, relapse, progress, breakthrough, job, relationship, break-up, loss of job, education, flunk out, return to crisis, etc., etc., etc. But one thing is clear to me and that is that THE MEDICATION WILL GET IN THE WAY OF THE PROCESS AND BE HARMFUL TO THE PERSON. So what do we do if we don’t use medication?
We affirm the process, we let the person know that we don’t know why this is happening, we don’t imagine that the person has chosen this state of being or has much control over it but we believe that it is somehow meaningful and functional and that going through it will lead to health and growth. We hear about the hallucinations and help the person wonder about what they are doing there and what they are all about. We listen to the delusions and wonder about them, what is their significance, what are they code for, what is their function? We encourage the expression of whatever is going on inside. We help the person to use it somehow in moving forward.
Another way of putting it is that we provide a place of physical and psychological safety. In the present standard of care, we may do a fairly good job of providing physical safety. But far from providing psychological safety, we terrify, alienate and misguide. By giving the message that the person has a serious disease, a disease that is caused by chemical imbalances and brain disorder, we create a major impediment to recovery.
John Weir Perry spent a lot of time listening to persons diagnosed with schizophrenia. He learned that, if he listened and encouraged, there emerged a common pattern and theme to the psychic material that was being expressed. The person typically believed they had been annointed as a savior, an important figure in the battle between good and evil, democracy and communism, God and the Devil. They saw themselves as being engaged in an important way in that battle both within and without themselves. There was a focus on death and rebirth and on the creation of a new world. There is a regression to the beginning, to early life, to the beginning of the earth. to the beginning of time. And, if the process is encouraged and allowed to proceed, there eventually is an embracing of wholeness and an ability to accept oneself as being both good and evil, pretty and ugly, smart and stupid, loveable and repuslive, giving and voraciously taking, etc.
I learned a lot from the one person diagnosed with schizophrenia who I got to know well – a middle-aged woman who I saw regularly over a five-year period.
I learned that when she was in trouble or needed something she could be grounded and lucid. So I saw that she had some control of her symptoms and behavior.
I learned that when she was comfortable in my room she would say delusional things. I think she was constantly testing me out to see if she could push me away or if I would run away. Her delusions also put her in an exalted position – she had been christned by the first Pope. She knew Abrham Lincoln. Her father was a General and she grew up on a military base in India.
I learned that she couldn’t hold a job because she would quickly begin to believe that her co-workers were talking about her, criticizing, stealing. She would react in kind and get into trouble. Jack Rosberg helped me to understand that people diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia are deathly afraid of people for good reason and want nothing to do with them, essentially work hard at pushing them away. But, of course, there’s another part of them that craves connection. That’s enough to make one crazy.
I learned that the symptoms have at least three functions. They make life interesting and exciting to a person who is very isolated. They enable one to feel exalted and important. They enable one to avoid taking responsibility for behavior. As Perry learned, as Stanislave Grof has confirmed and according to the testimony of many patients, the symptoms also serve as a connection with the divine, the numinous, the spiritual, the transcendent.
So the worst thing about the biopsychiatric belief system and the use of medications is that they get in the way of the healing process and impede, rather than facilitate recovery.
OK, I’ve never been psychotic for any length of time, I don’t know how upsetting intrusive voices, images, feelings, sensations are. I’ve never been so terrified by people that I find sure-fire ways of pushing them away and distancing. I know there are persons diagnosed with psychotic disorders who choose to use the drugs and I think they ought to be able to do that. But the people who are helping them should let them know that the drugs are not only harmful in many ways but will get in the way of recovery and they would be well to wean themselves from them as quickly as possible.
Al Galves
Hi Al,
You and Ben are both bringing my attention to the way I said psychosis causes the problem, and pointing out that psychosis can be a solution and the problem is often just that it is seen as a problem. I have to agree, though I think that the process of seeing what is going on in one’s mind as a problem is often just defined as part of the psychosis, part of the “freaking out.” Of course, people around the person are usually freaking out too, so in that sense, they as well are part of the psychosis. And using medication when it is ill advised is also part of it. (Interestingly enough, fear that one is going mad is maybe the most common experience that precedes psychotic episodes – it also predicts when trauma reactions will become PTSD or long term PTSD.)
I was struck by the story a woman called Mary told on the Beyond Meds blog http://bipolarblast.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/a-heroines-journey/ She at one point saw a squirrel, and had a realization that she was looking at herself, that she was both the being looking and the being that was being looked at, or “Thou art that.” It could have been a nice experience of oneness, but it was terrifying to her, it meant to her she had delusions of grandeur and was going mad. This of course caused her to become even more emotionally aroused, and made everything very difficult. I don’t think such things are that uncommon: it’s the failure to accept or normalize experience that fuels psychosis.
By the way, I think Mary’s experience is one example of how it is sometimes a young person’s urge to explore, and not the urge to retreat, that initiates the psychosis. What happened to her was apparently in her boredom and alienation she got a bit too far out for herself, then got scared, and so took on aspects of “retreating” only in response to her scary experience.
It is very difficult to sum anything up about psychosis, as soon as you have said something, you realize there is something that contradicts it that is also true……
Ron Unger
Wow. So I am so glad that i have stumbled upon this article. I had Psychosis a year ago. It was the most traumatic thing i have been through in my life. The doctors could find nothing wrong in my brain. And they could not tell me why i got it. I did use use some drugs last summer but only a couple times and they were not very harmful ones. I did smoke a lot of pot but i stopped two weeks after my boyfriend broke up with me. Also my parents stopped talking to each other and everyone was too busy to even talk to me.. I felt like i had no friends and there was no one in the world but me… It was the first day of school of my senior year and i started noticing very odd things like an on-coming trip but very different. I didn’t think i was in the same reality anymore. It was so different from a phycadellic trip i want to make that clear. It felt way too real. I ended up driving frantically around town while having a panic attack and i hit another car. no one got hurt but i was going quite fast. I went to the mental hospital in rochester and it only got worse. I couldn’t eat or sleep. All i could do was think. This article couldnt explain even better most of what i was thinking about heaven and hell. there was much much more but it was soooo meaningful to me at the time. so serious. I wish people would have been more interactive with me and my thoughts instead of giving me puzzles and boardgames and movies that made me so much more lost!! And the pills were a terrible story…because of my pills alone i feel i could have died. I would wake up and be sweaty and faintish every morning. I ask myself though if i could have come down from it on my own…and im not sure that i could have. I was pretty sure that i was not gong to recover. It didnt help that everyone was pushing the fact that i was probably depressed after that. Which is far from the truth. I wont let anyone tell me i am because its just a plain bad mindset to have. But i do agree that i wish they would of had me in a different setting or at least tried to talk it through with me instead of having a bunch of scary doctors surrounding my bed every morning staring at me….and i had to try a billion different pills before they found one that worked. Today my head still feels messed up. My frontal lobe will be permanently damaged. and i now get sleep paralysis. I have been trying to figure out this puzzle for a year now. There was some positive things that happened too like i thought just as you would think an apple is red that everyone meaning all the doctors and nurses and everyone who helped me up to that point were all angels. That is just one example of something i dead believed. I also thought that if i slept i would end up dying or something very bad would happen so i never slept and i kept my eyes pryed open at all times. i could go on and on but i almost started crying when i read this article because it has been the only one i have read that i can closely closely relate to and agree on. If you have anymore information i would love to know
I just read another comment by Ron and I couldn’t agree more on that feeling of LOST that was what i kept saying over and over. I am lost i am stuck.. i soon figured out that i was starting to go in circles.. thats exactly what i was doing. I big circle. I often tested people too. And i would figure more out that way. I didnt say more at all. But i do distinctly remember that i figured out how to read minds except that it was such a complex thought who really knows what was going on.. but thats something that i stressed. I also stressed time. I had NO idea what time it was ever. And i did try to time travel a lot. it was the ONLY thing that was important to me besides seeing my family. And damn i tried hard to time travel back. I wish i could talk to doctors or some scientists and we could figure this out together. =P
Anti psychotics are highly damaging full stop and should only be used as a very last resort .People can and do recover from psychosis with out medications.If your computer was malfunctioning you wouldn’t open it up and smash one of the chips inside or pore acid all over it in the hope that it would fix the problem.To go to a doctor for help…….to a doctor that has swore an oath to do no harm and to be given a substance that destroys your brain is simply wrong.Especially so if the problem is software related.
How our society and the medical profession allows this to continue in this day and age is beyond my comprehension
I think the only hope we have is for a comet to hit the earth and blow the human race into oblivion