Support Coalition - David Oaks <dendron at efn.org> writes:
>> > Another poster asked you to desribe what this "dendritic spreading" is.
>> I'd suggest calling up Jill Taylor, and asking someone who has herself
> seen it with her own eyes, under a microscope: Phone 1-800-BRAIN-BANK.
> Though unfortunately Jill is hestitant to warn that these "changes" may
> be deleterious. Perhaps she thinks Haldol may prove to be the "smart
> drug" of the next millenium.
Prescribing drugs for people that create physical changes in their
brains, identifiable under a microscope, and physical neurological
disease, and *forcing* these drugs on people, suppressing information
about brain damage that is caused by the drugs -- tardive dyskinesia
is brain damage -- strikes me as utterly unconscionable and something
that happens much less in other areas of medicine.
What it sounds like to me is that the brain is trying to recover to
the medication, to adapt. Given those physical changes it could
mean that it creates a dependency where people *have* to take the
medication because they start hallucinating without it, reinforcing
a belief that they must have needed it in the first place because
they had a brain disease -- while actually the brain disease was
caused by the drugs.
I went to a doctor a couple of years ago because I was having
heart palpitations, dizzy spells. I was told they had drugs but
I was better off not taking them unless the palpitations became
an emergency -- if I lost consciousness because of them -- because
the drugs were bad for the heart. Would that the same standards
applied in psychiatry. People get the antipsychotic drugs pushed
at them at the drop of a hat.
A lot of this -- the forcible drugging, the way people can be picked
up by police and put into a mental hospital if they're acting odd --
and so on, seems to me to come from fear. The idea of "losing one's
mind", the fear of being out of touch in some basic way, is primal,
and it's suppressed by force, by stowing people who act disturbing
away in a mental hospital, etc. Other people are often much more
bothered by whatever is going on than the person themselves, which
is why drugs and hospitalization are often forced. Any time something
is forced, one has to ask -- what's in it for the forcing person?
This applies to some extent to neurological disease, too. There's a
book called "Rusty's Story" which was about a young woman who had
a form of epilepsy that involved seizures in her perception as well
as physical seizures -- she would be out of touch with what she
was doing at times, cut herself trying to shave in the shower and
laugh at the pink water ... She spent grim times in mental hospitals,
diagnosed psychotic, drugged out of her mind. She had the good luck
to have a friend who was a nurse, who got her out of the mental
hospitals, but then she went through hell with anti-epilepsy medication,
more and more seizures, until they were talking about doing brain
surgery on her ... She ended up just saying to her nurse friend, "If
I have seizures again, just throw me in a closet, don't take me to
a hospital, the hospital is dangerous for me" She wore a
football helmet so her head wouldn't get injured. It turned out
she was terribly toxic on an incredible overdose of medication, and
the seizures got much less when she withdrew from almost all of the
anti-seizure drugs. It's
a very wise book about how medicine can overdo it in trying to "fix"
something and sometimes it's better to accept people as they are, to
give kindness instead of more medicine. It's also disturbing in that
there's an implication that there were people in the
mental hospitals who really did "belong" there, because they really
were "insane". There was something of the same dynamic about
epilepsy as about a "mentally ill" label -- separate the person from
society and do anything at all, even cut up their brains, to end
the offending behavior.
There seems to be something very akin to racism which goes on
relative to people labelled "mentally ill". There's an us vs. them
mentality. Someone claimed the "mentally ill" do not dislike
neuroleptics because they're "different from us". This is similar
to people, way back in the 1800's, writing about how black people --
sane black people, that is -- did not dislike slavery because it
was natural for the negro race to be enslaved.
In 1851 a doctor, Samuel Cartwright, wrote about
how black people were prone to a disease called Dysaesthesia Aethiopis,
a disease which results from inactivity, whose cure was forced
labor -- "The compulsory power of
the white man, by making the slothful negro take active exercise,
puts into active play the lungs, through whose agency the vitalized
blood is sent to the brain to give liberty to the mind". In other
words, black people need slavery, it is good for them. He also wrote
about "drapetomania", a mental illness that caused slaves to run
away. The "sane" slaves liked slavery, and white people were doing
black people a favor by forcing them to work for them, just as
some "mental health" people think they are doing disturbing people a
favor by forcibly drugging them. People have claimed that the
"mentally ill" people in state mental hospitals didn't mind the
wards being unheated, etc. because "they're different from us, they
don't feel extremes of heat and cold like we do".
Also, making blanket statements about "schizophrenics" living in
fear, confusion and paranoia is a stereotyping of a large and
very varied bunch of people. I think that given the right
conditions of abuse and stress a lot of people would become
delusional. Dr. Helen Caldicott, I think it was, talked about
the aftermath of nuclear war, saying that a lot of people would
be delusional. If a person is deprived of sleep for a long time,
they'll start hallucinating. I think a lot of people labelled
"schizophrenic" have been through personal conditions -- abuse --
that were like a personal nuclear war. I think that delusional
states are a human reaction that all of us are more or less
susceptible to, under certain circumstances.
The assumption that the alternative for "schizophrenics" is
between a lifetime of paranoia, fear, disablement, etc and being
drugged is false. For many people a "schizophrenic" experience is
a reorganization of their personality. For a lot of people who
go through these experiences in their teenage years, it's part of
a difficult growing-up process and something they need to do. The
assumption that it's something that automatically *should* be drugged
away, and responded to by segregation from society, is false. What
a terrible thing to do to someone's adolescent growing-up crisis --
or someone's midlife crisis! People who are "schizophrenic" who
don't want drugs may know better than the doctors who want to drug
them what they really need. Delusions may be a way to partially
express some truth that is too painful to see directly, or that
one has been prohibited by society from seeing directly. For
example, I knew someone once, who probably would have been labelled
"paranoid schizophrenic" who used to talk a lot about how she was
the victim of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. This
seemed a metaphor for being the victim of a "nuclear war" between her
parents -- perhaps she wanted to preserve an illusion about having benign
or at least non-dangerous parents. Messing with someone's accommodations
by dumping heavy tranquilizing drugs in their brain seems terribly crude,
and when it's done by force is a fascist violation of civil liberties.
> But basically, a lot of the neuroleptic-induced "changes" in the brain
> have to do with the "rebound effect." When the neuroleptics suppress the
> dopamine receptors they "fight back," randomly creating more receptors.
>> There are quite a few other brain changes caused by neuroleptics. These
> are confirmed by animal studies (thus screening out the common call, "Oh,
> it's because they're crazy.")
>> Again, a back issue of JMB included a lot of cites about the various
> neuroleptic-induced brain damages. Actual measurable brain shrinkage
> is one of them.