I saw this vid and article a while ago and i thought they spoke the absolute, untouched, pure truth:
Article:
http://www.antipsychiatry.org/25reason.htm
Video:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BhC6hUZJIJ0 a
The whole world should know the malicious truth about psychitry.
This is going to be a very long post so if you choose to ignore/not read it I understand. BUT, if you are trying to decide whether psychiatry and psychiatric medications are good or evil, and are battling any type of mental illness, I hope you will take the time to read this post...
My intial reaction to that video was to post on here that the guy in this video is full oh shit. However, slandering him doesn't do anything beneficial in my opinion. Instead of trying to proves someone wrong through defamation, you should prove them wrong using facts that contradict what they say.
With that in mind, I would like to encourage anyone who is in the fence about whether Psychiatry is malicious/evil or not to simply Google "psychiatric success stories anecdotal." I'm not suggesting to sift through thousands of pages in psychiatric medical journals or look at research studies about the efficacy of psychiatry and psychiatric medications. Clearly, there is an anti-psychiatry sentiment many people on here hold which would dissuade them from believing any factual "research." For this I don't blame you. I remember reading a "research study" claiming that Invega Sustenna only cause fatigue/somnolence/tiredness in around 5% of the people who received the injection. From a pharmacological perspective, when we consider Invega operates by inhibiting/blocking dopamine-the very vehicle by which motivation, enthusiasm and energy flows through our mind and body, this statistics seems inaccurate at best.
Which is why I encourage you to look at some anecdotal evidence from people who benefited from psychiatry. It is my opinion that long-lasting antipsychotic injection should be reserved for ONLY people who genuinely have homicidal ideations and there is a serious threat of them acting on those thoughts. So, to a certain extent, I agree with some of the anti-psychiatry sentiments on here. Your feelings of frustration, anger, sadness and bitterness towards psychiatry are quite valid and you have every right to feel the way you do.
I just ask that you CONSIDER the idea that psychiatry can be a good thing. And for those of you reading along and following this thread from a distance, I hope you will not give up on psychiatry altogether because of this one horrible experience. The reason I say this is that I do suffer from Bipolar Disorder Type 1 with Psychotic features. The diagnosis is subjective because, like the guy in the video said, there are no actual tests that can be done which prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that BP Type 1 is real and that I have it. But what I can tell you is this. I don't think the guy in this video ever experienced true auditory and visual hallucinations or extremely delusional/irrational thoughts that put him in danger.
Why? Because I have experienced all of these and without the assistance of psychiatric medications they would have most likely persisted and ruined my life more than Invega Sustenna ever could. That's because if these delusions and hallucinations persisted, I could very well be dead. During my manic episodes, I thought my dead best friend was communicating with me and telling me that he was still alive and being held captive by gang members in the streets of Pittsburgh. So what did I do? I walked the streets in the ghettos of Pittsburgh during the middle of the night, WITH MY MMA GLOVES ON, ready to fight every single gang banger I encountered until I found my friend Garret...I saw visions such as a sign that said "Don't tread on me" flashing bright yellow lights on Brownsville road in the Carick area of Pittsburgh. That night I took to the streets of Brownsville road with my mma gloves and fight shorts on to find Garret by any means necessary. It was during this manic episode that I was surrounded by five gang members on Brownsville road and began to threaten me. Luckily, the cops drove by and the gang members scattered. I recognize how lucky I was in retrospect, but at the time I was thinking, "Focus on the middle guy and keep an eye on the outliers with your peripheral vision." The guy on my further most left then reached into his waistband and I thought to myself "It's ok. If he pulls out a gun, I'm going to use an inside slip and parry the gun 180degrees towards his chest with my left hand, grab the gun/trigger with my right hand and shoot him in the chest. Then I'll shoot the other four guys in the chest in rapid succession before they have a chance to pull out another gun." So, as he reached into his waistband, I SMILED.
Thankfully, he was only reaching down to pull up his jeans...anti-climactic I know.
After this incident, my roommate contacted my family from Wilkes-barre who then drove out to Pittsburgh to make sure I was okay. I continued to walk the streets in my mma gear once they arrived and flipped out thinking they were in danger. So they called the cops and I agreed to go to Western Psych in the Oakland area of Pittsburgh. Treatment there failed and then let me go while I was still manic. They could not tell I was still delusional, irrational, potentially homicidal and having visual hallucinations. To people who did not know me very well, I seemed very friendly, happy and stable.
Upon being released from Western psych (where I voluntarily admitted myself) , I traveled with my family back to Wilkes-Barre, PA and began to walk the streets of Wilkes-Barre looking for my dead friend Garret. I went to the police station shirtless and with my mma gloves and trunks on to drop of an imaginary criminal in an effort to "prove a point" to whatever gang bangers had Garret that I was not playing around...and that I'd find them and get Garret back to safety no matter what. Recognizing my abnormal behaviors, my sister and my parents asked me to go back to the hospital to make sure I was ok, so I did. They sent me to the ageism Geisinger Psychiatric Hospital in Bloomsburg, PA. During my first few days there, I remember that whenever I watched the news, the anchor or reporter would start off by saying, "The search for Garret continues." After a few days of being administered Abilify and lithium, these auditory hallucinations stopped and the realization that my best friend was actually dead and not alive but in danger sank in.
Once my thoughts cleared and I was thinking logically/rationally again, I felt embarrassed. But more importantly, I thought, "Holy shit! I can't believe I put myself in such dangerous situations."
Without psychiatric medications, I'd probably still be walking the streets in my mma gear looking for my dead best friend. That I'd be in jail for assault or even worse, dead in the streets somewhere. This is not an attempt at dramaticism. This is the harsh truth of how my brain was operating without medication.
THE MAIN POINT I am trying to make is that FOR ME, psychiatric medications were necessary for me to get my life back. A temporary dose of oral antipsychotics and a long-term dose of a mood-stabilizer prevented my manic episodes. Whenever I discontinued my psychiatric meds, I had another manic episode. So I do not believe psychiatry and psychiatric medications are all evil and malicious. For some people, myself included, they have the potential to be both a life-saver and a godsend.
