690 Peter Breggin on Healing "crazy" People who hear voices etc

Peter Breggin on Healing "crazy" People who hear voices etc

Newsletter published on 19 October 2014

This material is at http://mailstar.net/bulletins/Breggin-on-Healing.rtf

(1) Clarification - Peter Breggin on Helping the Suicidally Depressed
(2) Peter Breggin on Healing "crazy" People who hear voices etc
(3) Breggin on Bipolar

(1) Clarification - Peter Breggin on Helping the Suicidally Depressed
Subject: Re: How to Help the Suicidally Depressed Person - Dr. Peter Breggin
From: Mark Rasmussen <MR@aya.yale.edu>
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 06:46:54 +0100

Dear Peter,

 > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7OPWRqjaSQ

This is terrific  -  thank you very much!

By the way, I think that what Breggin says at 7:27 (where you have
"[unclear]") is:  "now that you're an adult".

Thanks again, and all the best,

Mark

(2) Peter Breggin on Healing "Crazy" People who hear voices etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F_kLbtnWWM

How to Help Deeply Disturbed Persons

Peter R. Breggin MD

Fourth in the" Simple Truths" Series.

TRANSCRIPT - transcribed by Peter Myers

I'm Peter Breggin, Peter R. Breggin MD, I'm a Psychiatrist, and this is
the fourth in my series of Simple Truths about Psychiatry.

The topic today is going to be the person who is Psychotic, and gets
labelled Schizophrenic, what what would really most effectively help
that individual. The first three presentations in this series have been
about the limits of psychiatric drugs, and how they are harmful to the
brain, and I think it's time to take a little break from that, and look
at how do we help, without using drugs, some of the most very upset people.

And my next presentation, following this one, will be on helping the
person who is so depressed that he or she is suicidal. So we will just
confront these issues directly.

I got started in Psychiatry when I was 18 years old. I was a freshman at
Harvard College, planning to go on and major, well I was majoring in
American History and Literature, and thinking maybe I'd be a Professor
in the future years.

A friend of mine invited me to volunteer at Metropolitan State Hospital;
it was in 1954. We went out to the hospital, which sat, as so many of
them do, like a medieval fortress on the top of the hill, outside of a
town. And when we entered the hospital, my immediate impression from the
stench, from the delapidated condition, from the bent over and
humiliated patients, was my uncle Dutch's descriptions of liberating an
Extermination camp toward the end of World War II. It profoundly
affected me.

Now I don't know why, but spontaneously I felt that if I had been in
thodse conditions, living like that, defined like that, abused and
deprived and lonely, that I wouldn't be able to keep my sanity. And as I
would visit with the patients, and I can't exactly tell you why, I never
had a sense that "Well, you're different from me; you're defective, I'm
not". I always had a sense that "There, but for the Grace of God, go I",
that this could happen to anyone, that life could break anyone
emotionally, was my sense of it. And certainly I thought at that time,
at the age of 18, that I was not invulnerable.

Well I ended up leading this program, even wrote a book about, my first
book, and lecturing about the program, I got really involved, as a young
boy really, in this whole field of mental health. And I went to the
superintendent, and I said, "We;'ve got like a dozen of us, and we want
to do more than just visit with the patients and take them on trips, and
clean the ward, and have parties and stuff. We think that it would be
really helpful if each of had our own patient, that we visited every
week during the school year, and we have this lovely Social Worker who's
willing to supervise us, and that it'd take but an hour or two of his
time a week, to supervise us.

The Principal – it's an interesting slip, because it's a bit like being
at school, I guess, only the worst parts of school – the Superintendent
of the Hospital was mad at me about this. But eventually he realized,
that if we left his hospital and went to another hospital, that we were
actually the best thing that had happened in a long time – we were
already getting good publicity for the hospital. So he gave a group of
us, about 12 as I recall, each our own patient, that could work with.
And he gave us patients who were so bad off, that he thought we couldn't
couldn't hurt them, patients they expected to spend the rest of their
lives in hospital. And I describe this scene, of the hospital and the
outcome, in the opening chapter of Toxic Psychiatry.

We got all but three of the patients out of the hospital, and over a
follow-up period only 2 or 3 came back. So I learned right away that the
Psychiatric treatments were doing more harm than good, and in the case
of the state Mental Hospital, horribly more harm than good. And that to
answer, to helping even the most disturbed human being, under the worst
possible conditions, was human relationship. And again I can't tell you
exactly why, but from the start, it looked to me like it was about love,
it was about people caring for one another. So back in the 50s I was
already writing about love as healing. I hadn't yet read Buber's I and
Thou, and other sophisticated books about this idea.

That's why I went into Psychiatry. But Psychiatry was changing, because
at the same tome the drugs came in, Toirazine, the first of the newly
lobomotizing drugs, and Psychiatry moved so striongly in the drug
direction that there was no room, by the time I graduated from Medical
School and started in Psychiatry, there was no room any more for
psychological or a social Psychiatry, but we were on the way to the
Psychiatry of today, which is "I'll diagnoze you, and drug you, and send
you home; maybe a Social Worker will take to you along the way, maybe."

So by the time I finished and went into private practice, I knew that
Psychiatry had gone in one direction, and I was going in a Psychological
and Social direction, for helping people.

Now, let's look at the most serious kind of a problem, the person who
becomes really nearly crazy. Let's say it's a 16 year old girl, and
abruptly, after a period of shyness usually, and a feeling somewhat
withdrawn and of being maybe different from other kids, this young woman
begins to hallucinate. She begins to hear voices blaming her for things,
voices persecuting her, voices talking mean to her. She begins to think
that she's somebody who's very special, and is somehow the centre of a
great deal of activity by other people, that are conspiring against her,
her mother and father are working with the CIA or with some other
organization. If she gets disturbed enough, at some point she might
think that she saw for a minute that her father had a tail, or that her
mother had horns, and she's frightened out of her mind.

Well, what's going on here? It's not as complicated as it may seem.
What's going on is that the social connections, the social fabric in
this person's life has begun to tear apart.

When people are functioning normally, we're very creative, we can do all
kinds and varieties of things, and people are really different. But when
people are breaking down, you get a lower common denominator, and things
begin to look more similar from person to person.

And so the person who is Psychotic has hallucinations or delusions, and
their thoughts can be very strange and not make any sense, and they're
also helpless, and they usually, in the case of someone who's going to
end up with a diagnosis of Schizophrenia – I don't use those diagnoses
but they're there – that person's been shy and withdrawn, and you see a
process taking place. The process is one of no longer trusting people.

So where do you go when you're so frightened, and usually so ashamed of
yourself, usually a lot of shame is involved, you're so ashamed of
yourself and you're so frightened that you don't believe anybody could
care for you, don't believe anybody could trust you, you don't trust
anybody. Where do you go? Well, if you're the sort of creative,
imaginative person who's going to get labelled Schizophrenic, you go
into what looks like very bad mataphors, broken poetry, and nightmarish,
literally nightmarish kinds of experiences. And rarely are they
comforting; the breakdown is not comforting

So, what is the beginning of recovery for this person? It's not very
complicated – it's the building of a trusting relationship with someone.
And hopefully, if the parents are responsible and are willing to
participate, healing the broken social threads of the family. That's the
answer.

That's the answer. Without even worrying why one person becomes very
disturbed and another doesn't, how much is the mother to blame or the
parents to blame, why does the social fabric unravel – without even
worrying about that, we do know what heals – and the family heals. And a
caring therapy relationship can heal.

Surprisingly, one of the most astonishingly effective moments in therapy
is the first session, with a young person who's not heavily drugged,
hopefuilly not drugged at all,  and who's very, very crazy, and you sit
with that person quietly and reassure them. I start out by saying, "It's
safe for you to tell me anything you want, because I never lock up
people against their will, and I heard that there was a threat that you
might get locked up, but see, I don't do that, and I don't give drugs
when people have a lot of emotional upset. You could tell me the most
frightening thing possible, I'm not going to give you psychiatric drugs.
So it's just safe, we can just talk."

And I can see some of the fear melt, when the person begins to think
that maybe I actually care about their feelings and I want to have a
safe space with themm create a caring place where I give off an aura of
healing, an aura of caring, an aura of empathy, because I'm actually
feeling it. It doeszn't fake very well, believe me.

Under those conditions you will see a person come back from deep
craziness within a relatively short time. You can even see it in
minutes. You can seee about halfway through and hour and a half, the
person's no longer cocking their head and listening, or looking out the
window, or staring at their feet, because he's relating to you. If you
stop and then you say, "Are you still hearing things?", they may say,
"No". It's not like it's all over, it's not like life is going to be all
fun and games after that, but you can see this process happen quickly.

Now, if you've got Mum and Dad there, and maybe Grandma, maybe somebody
else from a the family or a friend, out in the waiting room, and then
you bring in everybody, and you talk to them about how you want to heal
their relationships. It's not going to be a blaming of who did what to
who, we're not going to do that. We're going to talk about how do we
relate to each other in a loving way, and I'll use the word loving. I
know most people go to Psychiatrists for ten years and never hear the
word. But I think it's the key word. How are we going to communicate in
a supporting, caring and loving manner, and, maybe as a start, just
respectfully. So, don't do that disrespectful stuff, I know you're all
upset, but let's try another approach.

And if the family, the parents, are willing to respond to that, you can
help a person in a matter of weeks, not even months or years. You can
help somebody who had a breakdown in the summer go back to school in the
fall.

Now this is not some new news, this is not a great therapist in action
kind of business, in fact if you going to be a good therapist you have
to give up being a great therapist, and you have to think of your
clients and patients as having greatness, they're supposed to be the
ones that walk out feeling great, not you. But this has been done again
and again over centuries. Back in the 1800s and the late 1700s there was
an era called "Moral Therapy" where facilities usually run by Quakers –
the Tuke family in England – treated people of the most disturbed kind
with kindness and caring, and detailed instructions on how the aides had
to be educated in being respectful and thoughtful and not over-reacting,
and, as one of the Tuke's wrote, "keeping the Medical people out, with
their toxic treatments". And, as best we can tell, the rates of people
recovering were at least as good as now, and people weren't getting all
these horrible drug reactions, and terrible neurological disorders, and
shortened lifespan, and dementia, that the drugs that were used to treat
these folks can produce.

And then in this country, Lauren Mosher created something called Soteria
House. And you can just google "Moral Therapy", you can google "Soteria
House", you can read my Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry - it
has a section about this in it, and Toxic Psychiatry has a section in
it. But you can Google "Soteria House", or "Lauren Mosher". He showed
that if you took a group of people and had them go to a residential home
run by a Social Worker not a Psychiatrist, and where all the aides were
chosen not for their credentials but for their ability to care and be
gentle and not coerce them, and then you sent some folks there, and then
as a controlled clinical trial you sent some folks randomly to the local
mental hospital, people did better without the drugs in Soteria House.
Now, Psychiatry responded by pushing Lauren Mosher, who was the head of
the Schizophrenia branch at NIMH when he did these studies, they pushed
him out, and then California eventualy, after many years, closed down
Soteria House, but not until books and innumerable articles had been
written about it.

So, I wanted you to know at the start, because I've been real critical
of the drugs in the first few of my presentations, that there are very,
very good solutions to helping disturbed people, but they run counter to
the drug companies, the government programs that they organize medicine.
We need the public to be demanding these things. And there's another
good program you can google, it's called Open Dialogues – google "Open
Dialogues" – it's a Finnish program, and in that program, when people
start to have a breakdown in the community – in Lapland specifically,
Lapland, Finland – a team goes to the hom,e, and they have an open
dialogue, they talk among themselves and they talk with the patient. And
they have a saying that Schizophrenia exists in between the members of
the famoly. And they're so effective that they rarely use psychiatric
drugs, they even more rarely ever use the heavy anti-psychotic drugs,
they've been so effective that the rate of so-called Schizophrenia is
down to almost zero, because people are being helped in Lapland by these
caring, family-oriented interventions.

We're not ignorant about how to help people; we are not ignorant about
how to help the most disturbed people. I was doing it when I was 18;
therapists around the world are still doing it. We have projects around
the world; but we need you, the public, to say, "This is what we want.
We want caring havens to go to when we're in desperation." Thanks.

(3) Breggin on Bipolar

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/a-psychiatric-drug-story_b_634352.html

A Psychiatric Drug Story of Tragedy and Triumph

by Dr. Peter Breggin reform psychiatrist

The Huffington Post

Posted: 07/07/2010 1:04 pm EDT Updated: 11/17/2011 9:02 am EST

Today I am reproducing for my readers a letter that we recently received
from a woman I will call "Janice." My wife Ginger reads and responds to
most of the many communications that come to us each day through email
and the networking sites she has joined. Several times a week we will
get a communication that tells us that our reform work "saved my life."
I have never talked about this before because it seems self-serving, but
people need to know how lifesaving it can be when health professionals
dare to be honest about the hazards of psychiatric drugs and the value
of empathic therapeutic approaches.

This week we received several more such letters but one stood out with
its dramatic and heartfelt detail. Janice vividly portrays how she
suffered not only from the disabling effects of the drugs, but also from
the stigma of psychiatric diagnosis that discouraged her and made her
well meaning family insist that she remain on drugs. As it seems to be
in Janice's case, the vast majority of the adults labeled "bipolar" that
I see in my practice are suffering from antidepressant-induced mania in
addition to whatever original life trauma led them to be diagnosed in
the first place. I document several similar stories and provide the
background science in Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs
in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime.

Notice how much courage and motivation Janice received from a single
doctor verifying for her that her problems were due to psychological
trauma and not to an alleged psychiatric disease. This should lend
inspiration to health care practitioners who choose to speak honestly to
their patients about the origins of their emotional problems in the
story of their lives.

Janice went off psychiatric drugs cold turkey and suffered greatly as a
result. I never recommend this. But unfortunately too few health care
providers have any idea about the merits of withdrawing from psychiatric
drugs and how to help patients go about tapering off psychiatric drugs
in way to minimize the withdrawal effects.

Janice's story moves from tragedy to triumph. I offer it to you for the
inspiration that it provides and I wish to thank Janice for the trust
she has shown in sharing her story with us, and in allowing us to
publish it anonymously.

Janice's Story

Dear Ginger:

Your husband's work saved my life.

In 1992 I was told I was bipolar by a psychiatrist who spent about 20
minutes with me. We did not go into my abusive childhood or the fact
that I had recently lost my sister in a car accident. He put me on
Prozac and I chewed a hole in my lower lip, felt numb and went off of
the drug within a few weeks. When I returned he was angry at me for not
sticking with the medication and told me he was going to put me on
lithium. I ran away and stayed off medication for a few years.

I married and along the way had marriage trouble. My husband believed I
was an unmedicated bipolar and threatened to leave me if I did not get
back on medication. I then took Paxil [paroxetine]. I have to admit the
Paxil made my moods and depression even worse. I ended up divorced and
went on and off Paxil for about a year. Then I met someone else.

I lost a second sister in a car accident, she was eight months pregnant
and she and the baby were killed. I slipped into a deep depression and
found a new psychiatrist; he put me on depekote and wellbutrin. I feel
these medications actually made me act bipolar but in my heart I felt I
was not bipolar and I would question it and say "Maybe I have had just
had a bad life and need therapy." My family would reply, "If you love us
you will stay on your medications."

I hated my life. I fought suicidal thoughts constantly, I could barely
get up out of bed. I hated interacting with the world. After three years
I was on Risperdal (risperidone), for anger issues. I had a very bad
reaction to it and ended up in the emergency room thinking at the age of
33 that I was having a stroke.

My then fiance left me and said he couldn't handle living with me
anymore. I didn't blame him. I felt I would never be able to be happy or
maintain a normal relationship ever. So I threw all my medications away,
locked myself up in my apartment and waited to die.

I went through withdrawls for weeks, it was horrible. But eventually
something I hadn't expected happened, I began to feel different for the
first time in 10 years. I began to feel alive.
I confessed to a friend I had not been taking medication and he said I
looked great but begged me to go get back on meds. I had no insurance at
that point so I went to a clinic where they give medication to people on
an emergency basis.

At the clinic, I was treated so well. I was interviewed by two separate
doctors for a long time. After a while one of the doctors met with me in
his office and he asked, "How much of this do you think is bipolar and
how much do you think is your life?" I cried and said, "I don't know. I
keep telling everyone I think a lot of this is my life not that I am
bipolar." He said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but I think you
were misdiagnosed."

It was a dream come true!

He did confirm I had issues to deal with but he felt therapy was what I
needed. Just days later I went to the bookstore where I found Dr.
Breggin's book Toxic Psychiatry staring at me on the l sales rack! I
bought it and as I read it I felt so foolish. Years of my life were
wasted and gone because I never openly questioned these doctors.

I began therapy and was amazed how quickly I was able to solve issues
while off medication. On medication each session had been the same thing
and I never moved forward. Now I had to learn how to live my life all
over again, this time as a person without bipolar. I actually had to
learn how to be happy. It was so unreal to me.

That was all back in 2004. I still go to therapy. Since then I went to
grad school, married an amazing man, and now I am expecting a baby this
August. My mistrust of doctors has lead us to a homebirth. We have a
wonderful midwife and my pregnancy is low risk. This is something I gave
up on, having a child, because I had to be on all those medications and
never felt mentally stable enough to be a good mother, until now.

I am working on a memoir about being misdiagnosed, hoping it will help
free others. Everyone I know on medications had deeper issues.
Unfortunately few of my friends will listen to me. Even though they see
what happened to me, they still believe depression can be solved only
with pills. They would rather take medications than dig deep and deal
with the pain of the past.

Thanks for reading my story; this was actually the short version! Thanks
for the work you and your husband do.

Peter R. Breggin, MD is a psychiatrist in private practice in Ithaca,
New York, and the best-selling author of many books including
Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition (2008) and
Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence,
Suicide and Crime (2008). Dr. Breggin and his wife Ginger have formed a
new organization that encourages professionals and laypersons to
appreciate and to use empathic therapeutic approaches in their own lives
and in the lives of those they seek to help. We are holding our first
conference April 8-10, 2011 in Syracuse, New York with an array of
inspiring presenters. Dr. Breggin's professional website is
www.breggin.com>.

This material is at http://mailstar.net/bulletins/Breggin-on-Healing.rtf