BlissChick: Most Mental Illness is Manufactured

BlissChick: Most Mental Illness is Manufactured is a most awesomely wonderful post by my Blogger friend and fellow SRBT's (Survivor of Really Bad Things:)), Christine Claire Reed aka the BlissChick.


Over the past year I've noticed peoples heads are turning and as a society we are beginning to question the whole "illness" paradigm that surrounds the mental health industry. 

And Award Winning Scientific Journalist Robert Whitaker has had a lot to do with this. You can check out his blog on Psychology Today by clicking here and visit his personal blog by clicking here. You can also order his book Anatomy of an Epidemic from his blog.

Over the past week or so Christine (aka BlissChick) put on her PissedChick hat and came up with some astounding articles that I would like to share with you here:

1. Medicine Makes Me Sick - Love is the Cure In this post Christine bares her soul and reveals her pain and how pills seemed the easy answer but had some unfortunate side effects - including self harm behavior that had not existed before the drugs - and how she found healing...but it didn't come from the pills.
2. Most Mental Illness Is Manufactured is where we meet PissedChick:) Christine gets it on and makes it clear this illness model of our minds and emotions is questionable and that the "fix" doesn't come in pill form. We who have SRBT's - are not "sick" but injured. 
3. Ignoring Mental Injury is an excellent piece on the fact that there is a reason people feel f***ed up - and its not because our brains are broken.
4. You Are Not Mentally Ill Just Because Is an expose on how our pain - emotional, psychological - and its expression - our behaviors - have become so pathologized that we as a nation and society have been conditioned aka brainwashed - to believe something is wrong with us if we aren't "like everyone else". 

Before I go any further I feel its important to ask you to click here to read my disclaimer before you decide that you need to put me in my place or remind me that there are good therapists out there or that you believe the drugs helped you and how dare I bring this subject up...

In other words - if you are content with your quality of life and current mental health care - bravo!

But don't blast me and others for wanting more than to exist in a drugged stupor and find true, complete and full recovery from the pain of the past...something I never found and was even told in my time in the mental health system - was not possible because - of course - I was "sick" and would need the drugs "for life". 

PissedChick....thanks for taking the chance and putting your voice out there on these issues. 

Its time more of us found our inner bitch and started speaking up about these issues instead of being bullied and shamed into the silence that enables the abuse and crippling to continue as America keeps its proverbial head in the sand and pretends that these drugs are not killing, crippling and destroying lives.

Visit Christine's blog by clicking here.

Some related posts from the archives:

My guest post at Emerging From Broken: Dysfunctional Relationships with Mental Health Providers (yes; this stuff is STILL happening every day in the good ole US of A)

I Wanted to Understand this Paradigm of "Mental Illness"

Creating a New Paradigm for Myself Part 1

Creating a New Paradigm Part 2

Seek Knowledge, find Wisdom, live your Truth!

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America — a note from Robert Whitaker

Over at Bipolar Blast ask Beyond Meds, todays post is a note from Author Robert Whitaker regarding his book The Anatomy of An Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. The link to view this book on Amazon is here.

The question...Could our drug based paradigm of care be fueling this epidemic?

Whitiker continues: To answer that question, I fleshed out what the scientific literature has to say about the long-term effects of psychiatric medications. I think an observation made by one of the many people I interviewed for the book aptly sums up the tale told in the scientific literature. She said:

“With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know, you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness.”

After this tale of science is told (and the book basically relates a history of science that has unfolded since the 1950s), I look at why our society doesn’t know about the many studies that have documented the poor long-term outcomes. These study results never get reported in the newspapers, and the book explores the financial reasons why that is so.

You can read the rest of this note here.

You can see my earlier post on this issue here "Another rant...which came first? The Chicken or the Goose?"

So what's the purpose of posting this information? Because I believe that we as consumers are not getting all of our options, we are not being fully informed. Instead we are being sold on the idea that we are somehow biologically broken and that Big Pharma has the ONLY answer to the issue of mental health and wellness.

This is a subject not widely discussed yet and carries much of the similarities of the fraud carried out on consumers of tobacco product and even the most recent financial crisis where we were presented with the idea that the banks were operating in our best interest, yet their greed and offering only one side of the story - incomplete information - leads consumers to believe that as the "professionals" we can trust what they are telling us to be "truth" and in our best interest.

Each year, Big Pharma is being called on it's misuse of America's trust as they invent new ways of pushing their drugs, telling us that this is the only answer to our heartburn (try eating less junk) our "Fibromyalgia" (women are getting over this every day by excercising and managing stress healthier) or how this magic pill will "fix" us. And they have done a grand job at pulling the wool over the eyes of consumers as we staunchly defend that we are "chemically imbalanced". I know because I've lived it. To have done otherwise was unthinkable because this was my last hope at finding a solution to the emotional distress and faulty cognitions that kept me bound in self doubt and dependance on drugs to cope each day. After all, without being "mentally ill"...who was I and what the hell was "wrong" with me?

Today, the Government has finally stepped in and penalized Big Tobacco for the lies that we ate up when we bought in that tobacco was harmless and safe. Banks that have gouged Americans for years are being brought up short and held responsible for their mismanagement of America's resources. And each year Big Pharma pays millions in settlements to those their "medicines" have harmed and fines to the Government for their fraud in misleading consumers on various drugs.

This may not be your opinion, and my goal is not to change your mind about this but to encourage you to do your own reading and research on this message that somehow we are broken and drugs (not to mention the lifetime bill for never ending therapy that goes along with this assumption) are the only answer.

So here's what Big Pharma isn't telling us; that we can learn to manage our thoughts, our emotional instability and find our way out of the muck and mire of "mental illness". We can learn to develop rational thinking and emotional expression that heals instead of incapacitates us. We can learn the life skills to help us overcome those feelings of "less than" or "different".

Drugs? They may have a place and even benefit us short term to manage crisis and keep ourselves safe - but they also inhibit our ability to learn, to think, to recall and remember both short term and long term. But when they are heralded as the "only" solution to mental health issues the result can be painfully debilitating as our hope for a better outcome is reduced to simply "managing" and surviving.

Finding light in the darkness of mental illness requires the use of and access to our thoughts and emotions - the things that medication "numbs".

So while using medication may be helpful in the short term - the long term use of it inhibits and prevents us from accessing the natural solution of learning new ways of coping and how to trust the natural emotional process that we are working so diligently to avoid.

(Note:I am not a physician. This information should not be taken as medical directions. Do not discontinue any medications without first doing your own due diligence and making the decision that is best for you.)

*****

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