(This is a two part book excerpt. I recently added the second part. I may develop a documentary on the subject soon.)
Far too many people with mental disorders are locked in prisons, and far too many without mental disorders are locked in mental hospitals. Is it unfortunate when courts can’t recognize that a person has a mental disorder that is responsible for their crime and they are locked in prison where their condition will never improve. Similarly, some violent people who don’t have mental disorders, and are just angry will abuse the system and plead insanity to avoid jail time. Some people don’t seem to understand that the desire to be violent or even kill isn’t a desire exclusive to “crazy” people. Most people have considered killing another person or at least being violent. The only thing that separates those who just think about it and those who actually do it is a difference in the severity of the experiences that led to those emotions. Most violent people are just angry, and there are acceptable forms of violence in the world that very few question that are committed by people who are often just as violent as serial killers, and they are generally violent for the same reason: they are angry. Millions are slaughtered by government sanctioned wars and thousands are killed by police every year. These people are generally just as violent as serial killers. Some people join the army just because they want to kill people. This doesn’t necessarily mean they have mental disorders (although some of them surely do), just as not all serial killers are crazy, (although insanity is very difficult to define) many are just angry. But soldiers aren’t put in mental hospitals or prisons like serial killers are, even though what they do is often no different. It is merely perceived differently. Soldiers are often considered heroes, whereas those who kill without government approval, no matter what the rationale for their actions, are often looked down upon as scum. Even a soldier who kills hundreds in a war fought for oil, revenge, or petty ideological differences is often still considered a hero. But murderers don’t ever receive the same praise. If a government can commit mass murder for revenge or money then why should they have the ability to imprison people who do the same? What gives governments the moral authority to decide who lives and dies or decide which murders are moral or to even use force of any kind without there being a clear threat and no other alternative? Murderers should be punished, but government sanctioned murder is it still murder. It is contradictory for a government to reward soldiers and punish someone whose actions may have been more justified than a soldiers or call them crazy and lock them in a mental hospital. The moral distinction between the two types of violence is not logical. No one should have the ability to decide who lives and dies, especially not powerful institutions controlled by the powerful, elite, egocentric few.
The fact is most people aren’t put in prison or mental institutions to prevent crimes or societal harm. Prison just makes people more dangerous and willing to commit crimes. People go to prison because the government wants to punish them. It is called a retributive justice system because retribution is its sole goal. But if someone goes outside the law for their own retribution they are perceived the same as all the other criminals in prison. Prisons and mental institutions are supposed to reformatory and helpful, but an institution can’t be punishing and helpful at the same time. It just doesn’t make sense. In almost all cases they are just places of punishment.
Most people don’t realize how easy it is to be committed to a mental hospital (or be arrested for that matter.) You can be a harmless pacifist and still be commited. You don’t even have to commit a crime in order to be committed in most countries and being ‘psychotic’ does not mean violent, even though colloquially the word is used that way. The institutionalization of people with mental disorders isn’t driven by a desire to protect people or help inmates but rather by a desire to create uniformity in society. If an officer believes you are threat to yourself or others you can be held in protective custody in a hospital where you will be analyzed by a doctor and if this doctor agrees you will be admitted on an emergency application and you cannot leave without the doctors consent. You can only fight the doctor’s decision after 10 days (in most states in the US – global law on involuntary commitment varies widely) at which point you can hire a lawyer and challenge the decision in court, and getting to court usually takes a few weeks in addition. If you lose in court you can be held indefinitely until the doctor believes you are well enough to leave. This means without ever committing a crime if one doctor believes you are a threat to yourself or others you can be imprisoned in a hospital where every aspect of your life is controlled and you are forced to take medication that you don’t even need until your death. If the court believes the doctor made a mistake you are free to go. But even in this case, you will have lost at least a month of your life or more at that point, and such an experience can be traumatic as well as finically costly. A one month stay in a psychiatric ward can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
In some states in the US, anyone can accuse you of being psychotic and the police can act on it by bringing you to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation where they have the legal right to hold you for 72 hours. If this happens you have fewer rights than someone who is arrested. People who are formally arrested have Miranda rights, which give them the right to remain silent and not answer questions during a police interrogation and the right to counsel, even if the person in custody doesn’t have the money for a lawyer. These rights are guaranteed by 5th and 6th amendment, which protect people from self-incrimination and give everyone the right to counsel. Ignoring the Miranda rights as an officer is unconstitutional. A person taken in for psychiatric evaluation does not have these rights, even though they are being stripped of their freedom just as those held in police custody for crimes before trial. They don’t have the right to remain silent or free counsel and if they do remain silent, doctors could use this against them by claiming that this is symptomatic of a supposed mental illness. If a doctor makes a determination that you are psychotic, they could hold you for up to 10 days until you finally have some legal rights in a court, as I have said. But if a judge agrees with the doctors (and they usually do) they can hold you indefinitely. Nothing could be more Orwellian, and most people aren’t even aware of this or if they are, they just foolishly think it could never happen to them.
When a person is involuntarily committed purely because of what he or she said or wrote, this is a violation of the first amendment as well, which gives people the right to free speech. What is next? Thought crimes? The “mental health” industry is a systematic way of creating uniformity in personality, obedience and perpetuating mainstream ideologies. It is a mechanism of control and it maintains the status quo.
The Rosenhan Experiment conducted in 1973 showed just how easy it is to be locked away in a mental hospital for no legitimate reason. In this experiment psychologist David Rosenhan and eight mentally healthy associates attempted to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals by arranging appointments and feigning auditory hallucinations. Six of Rosenhan’s eight associates were also medical professionals. 3 were psychologists, one was a psychology graduate, one a pediatrician and another a psychiatrist. They had no history of mental health problems. During their initial evaluation, they pretended to hear voices saying things like “empty” and “hollow.” They were all admitted despite faking symptoms to 12 different hospitals (at different times). As planned, after being admitted they acted normally and didn’t claim to have any more hallucinations, but in spite of this 7 were diagnosed with schizophrenia and one with manic depressive psychosis and they were held against their will for weeks. Some were forced to stay for 52 days and take anti-psychotics, and they were only released after doctors at the hospitals believed their schizophrenia was “in remission.” Rosenhan himself was forced to stay for two months and later published the experiment in Science magazine and called it “Being Sane in Insane Places” He explained on BBC after the experiment that only way he could get out was to agree with the psychiatrists and “admit” he was insane and willing to change. “I told friends, I told my family, ‘I can get out when I can get out. That’s all. I’ll be there for a couple of days and I’ll get out.’ Nobody knew I’d be there for two months … The only way out was to point out that they’re [the psychiatrists] correct. They had said I was insane, ‘I am insane; but I am getting better.’ That was an affirmation of their view of me.” If a patient wants out and they feel they don’t belong there, doctors can say this is symptomatic of their “illness” and that they simply have not accepted their problem. The only way to show “improvement” is to agree with doctors on every issue and placate them like children because that is what many are. While the hospitals couldn’t identify them as imposters conducting an experiment, many of the patients could. 35 out of 118 patients in the first three hospitals believed they were faking symptoms and some of them realized they were conducting an experiment.
Rosenhan determined that the psychiatric diagnosis is subjective and that mental patients are often dehumanized due to the stigma surrounding mental disorders. He could also see the clear monetary incentive that exists for keeping sane people institutionalized. Many experiments have since been conducted with similar results, yet there has been very little reformation of mental hospitals in recent history.
People seem to forget mental institutions are still businesses. Private psychiatric hospitals make more money the longer you stay and they decide when you leave. No other business has the ability to hold people against their will. People in restaurants can’t be legally chained to the floor. Yet somehow since this only affects a minority of the population behind closed doors, no one seems to notice or see the difference.
What “necessitates” a psychiatric evaluation is being human. Everyone is capable of doing themselves or other harm. We’re all “potential threats.” Anyone who can pick up a knife or gun is a potential threat to others and themselves, and how could you possibly predict with 100% accuracy what a person might do to his/herself or others? There are also soldiers, police, covert officials, professional fighters and military contractors and many others who are trained to be a threat to others, as I have said, and they certainly aren’t considered crazy by the majority.
We put all of our trust in doctors, police and judges, and we don’t realize how easily they can take away our freedom just because they want to. There is no unbiased, independent agency that oversees doctors’ decisions to avoid fraud. People don’t consider the massive financial incentive that exists to keep people in prisons and mental hospitals that don’t belong there. We don’t believe they would ever abuse their power for financial gain or ideological reasons because we trust them and most people don’t end up in prison or a mental hospital, so the knowledge of the corruption and abuse of power isn’t widespread.
Psychology is also such a changing field of research because so little is truly understood about mental health, mental disorders and “normality.” It is also a young field of research. Psychoanalysis was only founded about 100 years ago by Sigmund Freud and his ideas weren’t rooted in science at all. He developed many wild theories about human behavior that were based purely on his own observations and beliefs. His “Oedipus Complex” theory is a good example. Freud claimed during what he called the “phallic stage” of development that children want to kill their fathers and are attracted to their mothers.
There have also been so many psychiatric medications that were made just years ago, which have not been thoroughly tested and that millions of people take and rely on every day. Many of these medications aren’t taken to improve mental health, but are rather taken to make people act “normally” and help them adhere to societal norms, which pharmaceutical companies and doctors in part define. Doctors, governments, corporate leaders and other authority figures define normality, which is very subjective, to achieve their own agenda. What many strive to do is essentially remove emotion from people because strong emotions are considered abnormal by many psychiatrists. Being sad is abnormal, being mad is abnormal, even being happy is considered abnormal or interpreted as mania or some other ridiculous condition. Doctors working in mental institutions often want mental patients to be emotionless drones because they are most easily controlled this way, as do others in positions of power. People in government want the people to be complacent, mindless consumer drones that listen to what they told to do and believe what they are told to believe. Instead of addressing the root cause of their depression people are often just told to take a pill to make them feel better. This way their lives will never actually improve, but they will stay complacent in their menial lives and their menial jobs, which they shouldn’t enjoy because they simply aren’t meant to be enjoyable.
Doctors in many mental hospitals also over-medicate their patients and give them medications that keep all of their nuero-transmitters on a consistent, unchanging level to avoid erratic behavior, but they create emotionless zombies in the process, and such negligent overmedication can also lead to the development of legitimate mental disorders. A perfectly healthy, innocent person can be locked in a mental hospital and develop an actual mental disorder due to the way they are treated in the hospital.
What is considered normal and sane is just whatever is popular, and what is popular is defined by the forces that control us. Normal people support their government. They don’t question authority; they pursue mindless jobs in order to buy bigger houses, better cars and everything else corporations tell us we need. Normal people are religious and they pray to their God every night. And normal people act like the people they see in the media and in television and aspire to be them. This conception of normality encourages sameness for the benefit of the forces that control us. But what is almost never considered is that the most common and popular beliefs are abnormal and insane, and this is why the radicals who go against the majority are always marginalized and considered insane or abnormal. But these people are often the most important. Normality is also defined by doctors who decide who is insane and who isn’t, but their conceptions of normality are shaped by the same forces, and they encourage sameness as well. And the radicals who go against the majority can be imprisoned by these doctors just for being different. Punitive psychiatry has been countless times by dictatorships and “democracies” alike to punish and silence political dissidents and it still is to this day. Many therapists who work in psychiatric wards and state mental hospitals, as well as most political and corporate powers see selflessness as a mental disorder. If you put the interests of people you haven’t met before over your own then you must be insane. This is why self-less political dissidents were imprisoned during the Soviet Union and during many other dictatorships. It is a tool of political control but also exemplary of the collective idea that we should put ourselves first and ignore the needs of the rest of the world.
You can’t know what it is like be someone who is deemed insane or what resulted in their current mental condition if you don’t ask them. We should be learning from mental patients and not the other way around. Many psychiatric doctors treat them like animals. They try to analyze humanity and feel they are above most humans without realizing they are a part of humanity. In order to analyze humanity, identity, insanity and any other human extreme you need to include yourself in your theory. You need to realize that you are a product of the very same things as anyone else. Mental patients dare question the practices and knowledge of the self-proclaimed all-knowing elites, and act in a way that is not in accordance with social expectations. This is all psychiatric doctors know about mental patients. Nothing more. They often know nothing about what led their mental condition and they don’t try to understand. They just fill them with drugs until they start to live up to social expectations, which are to be a zombie: wake up, go to work, slave away, go back to your small apartment, go to sleep, repeat. Most mental patients do need help, but they’re not being given it. They’re being given elitist nonsense from doctors that simply want them to conform to social expectations without actually helping them. Most psychiatric doctors who work in wards or state facilities don’t pursue their line of work because they want to help people struggling with mental disorders. They just want to profit from them. Usually the nurses care more than the doctors do. Many also receive huge pay-outs from large pharmaceutical companies for endorsing as well as over-prescribing their garbage. They also lie about their effects. Big pharmaceutical reps often visit hospitals and cozy up to doctors in order to push whatever they’re selling, much like drug dealers, and most doctors buy them. It is worth mentioning, however, that there are a number of well-intentioned, effective, compassionate psychologists who don’t just work for the money, but they seem to be few and far between.
I would argue that republicanism and religiosity are greater mental disorders than the so called disorders many hospitalized for. Republicanism is a social disorder because its core ideological principles are narcissistic, selfish and bigoted. And people who pray literally believe a being in the sky can hear their thoughts and grant them wishes. If someone were to tell you this is what they believed without explaining that they are religious you would probably believe that person is disturbed based on that description. Mental hospitals often encourage religion, which in my opinion is extremely counterproductive. What is considered socially and ideologically normal in the world is largely abnormal, and these perceptions are perpetuated by the forces that truly control us the world.
Defining Normality and Insanity
As I have said, what is normal is whatever is popular, and insanity is just whatever isn’t popular, and certain trends aren’t always popular for good or rational reasons. Slavery was popular and therefore normal in many countries at a point in time, and questioning it was considered insane by some. For this reason and others insanity can’t be defined objectively. Insanity could be defined as irrationality, but this is also subjective and not largely agreed upon. Most of the world is religious, even though religion is largely irrational because it’s based on myth.
Today, acting in self-destructive or destructive ways is often considered insane, (people are usually involuntarily committed because they are believed to be threat to themselves or others) because it is irrational to harm other people without reason. But as I have said, there are plenty of people with their reasons and many socially acceptable and rewarded forms of violence (self-defense being the most moral one) that aren’t considered insane, and the sloppy distinction made between the two forms of violence was made by societal norms and popular beliefs, not by rational thinking or any thought-out moral principle. One could also act in ways deemed insane by society just to be perceived as insane, but have a perfectly “healthy” brain, which further confuses the definition of insanity. You feign insanity, but you can’t feign cancer, which calls into question the validity of its diagnosis.
Defining normality is difficult because there is no such thing as normal or abnormal human behavior. How can you sit normally, walk normally, or talk normally? Every behavior is technically natural because we are a part of nature. Neurological activity causes all actions, and given the right stimulus any behavior is possible. Many separate their conception of themselves from the physical processes that cause our thoughts and actions, but they shouldn’t because it alienates people with certain personalities. “Insanity” becomes some ambiguous, murky, scary thing that infects people like an illness. But any behavior deemed insane has a neurological basis. It can be understood and explained.
Surely an extremely broad range of behaviors could be considered normal, but anything can be perceived as an abnormal from some perspective as well. It all depends on the person interpreting the behavior. Maybe your posture is rigid or too slouched or maybe you speak too loudly or too softly. Maybe you are too energetic or too lethargic (catatonia) or too tense or too relaxed. These contrasting behaviors can be used by psychiatrists to diagnosis patients with mental disorders and justify their institutionalization. Even social anxiety, something everyone at some point deals with, is considered a mental disorder by the current Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM-IV-TR) of mental disorders. Up until the 1970s the WHO and the APA even considered homosexuality a psychiatric disorder. The DSM and ICD will define any difference as an illness.
There is an infinitely broad range of possible human behaviors. You could call “normal behavior” the average of all of human behavior or the most common behaviors. But normal behavior isn’t always beneficial to society as a whole and common behaviors aren’t always common for a good reason. As I have said slavery was a common and accepted practice, so “normality” or average human behavior shouldn’t be considered positive or negative without a good reason. Normal or common human behavior right now isn’t positive. If it was, the world we live in wouldn’t be so terrible and full of suffering. The most common behaviors are constantly changing for different reasons, good and bad. But they’re not some ideal to be copied.
Einstein’s definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is a good definition, but it is incomplete. People can do this because they are uniformed and don’t understand the physical laws that create consistency or because they have physical brain damage or because they have symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, and this doesn’t mean they’re insane. A more complete definition might be that insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting a different outcome while having the information to know that the outcome will be the same. If a person becomes disconnected from the real world due to an inability to distinguish external and internal stimuli, this may occur. This is the technical definition of psychosis.
The word sane derives from the Latin word Sanus, which means “healthy.” Insanity therefore means unhealthy or, more specifically, it refers to poor health of the mind. But sometimes it is difficult to determine mental health. If a person suffers brain damage then you can make a fairly accurate, scientific assessment of the person’s mental health. But when the mental issues a person has are less tangible, it is much more difficult to make an objective assessment of their mental health. Insanity is an outdated term not largely used by doctors anymore. But when a person with a mental disorder commits a crime they are often sent to institutions “for the criminally insane.” Insane is still a legitimate legal term as well and if a person is deemed “insane” by a court it this will have an enormous impact on the person’s sentence and overall fate. (Competency to stand trial can also be affected by learning disorders and mental handicaps.) The words psychotic and psychosis have replaced insanity in most medical contexts and this word is often used synonymously with schizophrenia. But while this word has a concrete meaning (inability to distinguish external and internal stimuli), it often used by doctors to describe a wide range of behaviors that they deem unwanted, but are not technically psychotic.
Psychosis is derived from the Greek word “psyche” (ψυχή) and “osis” (-ωσις). Psyche means mind or soul and “osis” means an abnormal condition, so psychosis literally means an abnormal condition of the mind. Psychosis is usually used as a negative term, but an abnormal condition of the mind can be positive or negative. Everyone has a unique nuero-chemistry and what is normal for one person could be abnormal for another, and what is healthy for one could be unhealthy for another. A healthy mind could be considered a happy mind or a mind that doesn’t malfunction by correctly discerning what is real and what isn’t, but one could be very happy but also very disconnected from reality or be very sad without being at all psychotic. Extremely elated mood is sometimes considered a symptom of psychosis itself, as is the opposite. Since there is so much we have yet to learn about our world, very different interpretations of reality could also be considered equally valid in a sense, which further confuses the issue. Psychosis can also be easily feigned and if a person has hallucinations this doesn’t mean they are incapable of acting rationally or peacefully.
Psychosis, as stated, is often used to describe behaviors that are not a result of inability to distinguish external and internal stimuli. Psychosis is very much a subjective term used most often to describe behavior that is contrary to social constructs and expectations. If extremely nihilistic or destructive behavior was considered normal in a society then a peaceful, self-less person would be considered psychotic by that society. Doctors also claim psychosis can be induced by a wide range of unrelated maladies (and natural processes like menstruation and childbirth) and so they are clearly defining far too many behaviors as psychotic. Many personality disorders are said to produce psychosis, as are certain drugs. Psychosis (and schizophrenia) are really terms used to describe unusual, unexpected and unpredictable perceived behaviors that most doctors deem necessary to control with nueroleptics. But a person who experiences brain malfunctions could consider them positive changes, and mental states that are often identified as psychosis by doctors (like certain states of intoxication) are considered desirable by some and so psychosis should not have a strictly positive or negative connotation. True psychosis is usually caused by spontaneous activity in the brain, and it should only be used to describe this condition.
The purpose of the brain is to collect information from external stimuli, process it coherently and produce a meaningful response. However, sometimes spontaneous activity in the primary sensory areas of the brain, which can be triggered by a host of different things, can be misinterpreted by secondary sensory areas of the brain as information from external stimuli, which means the mind will sense things that don’t physically exist. These are called hallucinations and they can affect any of the 5 senses. They are not just caused by mental disorders or drugs. If the brain lacks provocation from external stimuli (sensory deprivation) it can lose contact with the real world as the brain is overwhelmed by spontaneous activity. Hallucinations or a loss of conception of reality can also be induced by drugs as stated, some of which increase spontaneous cortical activity to the point at which real information gathered from the external stimuli in the real world is “drowned out.” But hallucinations aren’t always considered psychotic. If a person has sensory hallucinations but he or she is able recognize that they are caused by internal stimuli and not external stimuli and thus not part of reality, the person wouldn’t be considered psychotic. Therefore, a person who hallucinates due to a psychedelic drug and is able to attribute the cause of the hallucinations to the drug would not be considered psychotic, even though many doctors claim hallucinogenic drugs always cause psychosis. Another word is needed to describe a condition in which you’re not sure whether or not the stimuli you sense is internal or external. Surely, a person could still act rationally with some uncertainty about the source of sensory activity, so again, psychosis shouldn’t be synonymous with madness or irrationality.
As stated, psychosis is largely used by doctors to brand unwelcome or unwanted behaviors. But they consider what is unwanted or destructive behavior, and one doctor can define a behavior or characteristic as unwanted when it is preferred by the patient. The word psychosis was synonymous with madness or insanity up until the definition was divided to describe bipolar disorder and schizophrenia because it was realized that the word had too broad of a definition and that that patients deemed psychotic were very different. But splitting the definition of psychosis to describe two different disorders doesn’t make sense because it just creates two different labels for behavior that doctors can’t explain or distinguish.
Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are extremely vague, over-diagnosed disorders. From 1994-2004, the number of children diagnosed with bipolar people increased by 4000%. There are no medical tests for these disorders, much less for psychosis. Only a doctor can make the diagnosis, which is based on the person’s perceived behavior and what they tell the doctor, and this gives them the power to label anyone as bipolar, schizophrenic or psychotic. Because schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can produce so many different symptoms, it is likely that they are not discrete disorders but are rather several disorders or just sets of behaviors like most mental disorders. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are just easy ways to brand behavior that isn’t “normal”. That is not to say that people who have symptoms of these disorders don’t suffer and couldn’t benefit from treatment, but it’s the kind of treatment that is the problem. The treatment is to create uniformity at any cost. The same is true of most mental disorders. What constitutes a mental disorder is anything contrary to social expectations.
Mania, a symptom of bipolar disorder, is another condition that is sought to be fixed by doctors. Bipolar people can certainly suffer during episodes of mania or even become “psychotic”, but mania isn’t always negative because it can increase a person’s creativity and even feel euphoric. Mania is just another example of the APA’s branding and stigmatizing of uncommon behavior that they seek to control.
The “schizophrenia spectrum” also includes so many different sub-groups it’s absurd. The sub-groups are schizophrenia, schizotypal personality disorder, schizophreniform disorder, delusional disorder, brief psychotic disorder, substance-induced psychotic disorder, latent schizophrenia, borderline schizophrenia, latent schizophrenic reactions, pre-psychotic schizophrenia, prodromal schizophrenia, pseudo-nuerotic schizophrenia, pseudopsychopathic schizophrenia and psychotic and catatonic states with an unknown cause. Schizophrenia is clearly not a discrete disorder, which should be obvious if you consider it’s roots (or the ludicrous range of subgroups for the disorder). In some contexts schizophrenia still is used synonymously with “insanity”, which can be used to describe a range of behaviors an be triggered by a myriad of different things. Many of the schizophrenic disorders share the same symptoms and the names are completely arbitrary. An infinite number of degrees of severity for each symptom can exist, and unspecified psychotic disorder is extremely vague and is often used when doctors have no other way to describe the symptoms and/or when the doctor just wants to keep the patient institutionalized or pathologized.
The reality is mental disorders are not diseases. Every human mind is unique, and behaviors can change as easily as people change. Schizophrenia is really the catchall term used for people doctors can’t otherwise label, but schizophrenics couldn’t be more different. Most are just troubled people who need guidance, but their “condition” can result from a wide range of things. Sometimes, people can just break down after years of trauma and abuse, and this is a problem that can’t be completely solved by any pill.
Anti-psychotics are used to “treat” schizophrenia, and they mostly bind to the dopamine receptors and interrupt signaling resulting in reduced production of dopamine. People with schizophrenia are given these drugs because the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia speculates that schizophrenia is caused by an excess of dopamine due to signaling malfunction triggered by environmental and genetic factors. (Dopamine re-uptake inhibitors like cocaine, meth and crack have essentially have the opposite effect. They bind to dopamine receptors and increase dopamine in the synapse, which produces effects that can resemble the “positive symptoms” of schizophrenia. Doctors call it “cocaine psychosis” and “methamphetamine psychosis”. But these drugs ultimately decrease dopamine levels when addiction sets in. Some dopamine re-uptake inhibitors therefore might actually have a positive longterm effect on schizophrenics for this reason if long-term dopamine reduction is what they need, but this is very speculative. However, this may be why so many schizophrenics try to self-medicate with these drugs.) Most anti-psychotics have high affinity for the D2 subtype receptor, which is one of the 5 subtypes of dopamine receptors, but many can also bind to other dopamine subtypes, serotonin receptors, and other receptors, which produces a host of side effects. They often turn “schizophrenics” into emotionless zombies and can cause many separate mental disorders like tardive dyskinsea, which is a disorder that produces involuntary movement or twitching. Most of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia (avolition, flat affect, lack of speech) seem to be caused by the dopamine antagonists used to “treat” it, and there are many other side effects to anti-psychotics, which are far from minor. These include lowering life expectancy, weight gain, loss of motor control, decrease in white blood cell count, involuntary twisting of the limbs (tardive dystonia) tardive psychosis (psychosis induced by the over-perscription of anti-psychotics), tardive dysphrenia, nueroleptic dysphoria, nueroleptic malignant syndrome . Because monoamine antagonists like nueroleptics disrupt neuronal activity, their chronic use can also lead to nueronal death, irreversible abnormalities in brain function, and large decreases in brain volume. (They can also be lethal.) Many doctors believe that schizophrenia is a neuro-degenerative disorder, but this is probably not the case. People diagnosed with schizophrenia most likely only have decreases in brain volume because most schizophrenics take anti-psychotics, and these reduce brain volume. This seems to be the case in most studies. In 2010 doctors Joanna Moncrieff and Jonathan Leo analyzed data from multiple studies on the subject and found that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in every study who had never taken anti-psychotics showed “no major differences in global cerebral, grey-matter, ventricular, or CSF (cerebrospinal fluid) volumes,” whereas patients with chronic use of anti-psychotics “showed a greater reduction in whole-brain, cortical or grey-matter volumes, or a greater increase in CSF or ventricular volumes, compared with controls” in 14 of the 26 MRI studies. (Psychological Medicine)
No one organic cause has been found for schizophrenia and the life-time occurrence of substance abuse is 50% among people diagnosed with the disorder. Most of the symptoms can be experienced by anyone. Avolition (inability to experience pleasure), blunted affect (reduced emotional response), catatonia (motionlessness or excess motor activity), and “facial grimacing” can be symptoms of depression or brought on by a wide variety of drugs. And the symptoms of delusions and hallucinations (psychosis) associated with schizophrenia, don’t have to be present in a patient to be diagnosed with the disorder.
The positive, negative and cognitive symptoms schizophrenia produces are almost identical to those produced by certain drugs (mostly dopamine re-uptake inhibitors and dopamine antagonists) and people with schizophrenia are sometimes “mistaken for people who are high on drugs.” – Arthur Schoenstadt. Hallucinations and delusions, thought disorders and movements disorders can all be caused by drugs, as can flat affect, avolition and poor executive functioning. So it seems likely that many drug addicts who don’t have schizophrenia have been incorrectly labeled as schizophrenic by doctors. Stimulant addicts in particular are probably very often wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia because as I have said, most stimulants like meth, coke and crack inhibit the re-uptake of dopamine. So-called cocaine and amphethamine psychoses are considered separate mental “illnesses,” but they are hardly ever diagnosed.
Schizophrenics are still widely overprescribed dopamine antagonists because when they are administered they become easier to control and subdue. Dopamine antagonists block the binding of endogenous agonist dopamine to dopamine receptors inhibiting the signal produced by the agonist. This may have an anti-psychotic or tranquilizing effect temporarily, but over time the body may become overly sensitive to dopamine to compensate for the dulling effect of anti-psychotics. This can lead to the malady of the aforementioned side-effects, which are often mistaken for symptoms of schizophrenia itself and treated by doctors with more anti-psychotics, worsening the disorder.
Some researchers claim that marijuana use can cause schizophrenia mainy because many schizophrenics use it, but there is absolutely no relationship between marijuana and schizophrenia. Marijuana has almost no affect on dopamine system. It affects mostly cannabinoid receptors, and those with schizophrenia probably use it as a coping mechanism as they do other drugs. But to claim marijuana causes their condition is conflating correlation with causation. Most schizophrenics also smoke cigarettes, which have a greater effect on dopamine, although almost no one has made the claim that tobacco leads to schizophrenia. (Most schizophrenics actually find tobacco helps their symptoms.) The only reason “journalists” generally try to draw a link between marijuana and schizophrenia is because of their ideologies or politics and because they want less people to use it. Marijuana can increase the disorganization of thoughts, which is a cognitive symptom of schizophrenia, but this is the only way its related and could be compared. Dr Lester Grinspoon, Harvard Professor and psychiatrist who treated schizophrenic patients for 40 years has said the supposed link between schizophrenia and marijuana is absurd. “If you just take the fact that…the frequency of schizophrenia is about 1% world-round…you would expect with a drug used as often as it is that there would be a little [increase] but it doesn’t change a bit. It hasn’t changed. In fact, you can find as much information showing that marijuana is useful for schizophrenia than you can [claiming] it is harmful.” This is accurate. The number of cannabis users over the 20th century has risen exponentially to about 220 million now, yet there are only about 25 million people with schizophrenia worldwide.
A few psychiatrists and psychologists like David Healy have claimed that drug companies have tried to legitimize the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia in order to increase the sales of their anti-psychotics. Schizophrenia’s cause is probably more complex than drug companies would have doctors believe. It is a poorly understood mental disorder and the “quick-fix” of anti-psychotics will probably eventually be seen as malpractice, as will electroshock therapy which is sometimes used in tandem with anti-psychotics.
Before anti-psychotics were invented lobotomies were a common “treatment” for schizophrenia. The first lobotomy was conducted in 1935 and it was a very commonly used procedure for two decades in mostly developed rich countries. A lobotomy is a procedure in which part of the brain (usually connections to the prefrontal cortex) is destroyed by literally burning it or removing it completely. By 1951, 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the US alone. Using a lobotomy to “cure” a mental disorder is a lot like trying to fix a TV set by smashing it with a hammer. It is one of the most crude, invasive and amoral procedures to ever be used as a “treatment” for any ailment and it is still used today for schizophrenia, addiction and even minor mental disorders like depression and OCD, especially in the US and UK. The only reason lobotomies are and were supported by doctors is because they make patients easier to control just like anti-psychotics. They turn patients into brain-dead shells of their former selves. In 1948, Norbert Weiner, a famous author and professor at MIT said, “[P]refrontal lobotomy… has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier.” The most frightening aspect of lobotomies is that patients may never know how they were affected by them. They might feel okay despite being drastically different, less intelligent and/or suffering a host of other side-effects.
Although there is no scientific test for schizophrenia, many people with schizophrenia have been shown to have greater spontaneous activity in the left hemisphere of their brains while people with bipolar disorder seem to have greater activity in the right hemisphere of their brains. Superstitous people who believe in the paranormal and/or have strong religious beliefs (magical thinking) usually have greater spontaneous activation in the right hemisphere of their brain, as do creative people. The right hemisphere may favor making more “loose” connections, as opposed to the left hemisphere which makes more focused, mathematical connections. (Diego Piazzali et. all) Both areas of the brain have their purpose as does magical thinking, (artists and writers for example could benefit from such activity) but if a person isn’t grounded by a strong scientific perception of reality, it seems that too much spontaneous activity in either hemisphere of the brain could evolve into mental disorder or personally unwanted behaviors.
It is odd that most mental institutions encourage religion when magical thinking is considered a symptom of mental illness. Usually religious beliefs are only considered magical thinking if the pateint has very extreme, egocentric views (e.g. that they are religious prophets or Gods themselves) but why shouldn’t all religious beliefs be considered magical thinking? Since most religious beliefs are not supported by science, they are just myths, and I can’t imagine filling the heads of mental patients with more myths and fears is constructive. While it is sometimes well intentioned, It is largely used as another tool for control that creates uniformity.
It is clear the mental health industry pathologizes not just normal human differences, but also normal human emotions. Would a person who never experiences extreme emotions or never acts irrationally or “against the grain” be the picture of sanity? It seems like a person incapable of those things who constantly tries to adhere to social norms would be far more mentally unhealthy than someone who has mood swings and acts contrary to social expectations because the world is not always sensible or rational. To perceive it as though it was would irrational. Differences in animals is what causes evolution; they adapt to extremes. But we have left it up to doctors to determine which differences are beneficial (natural behaviors are just current behaviors) and thus we have left it up to them to determine in what direction our society and our minds are headed.
In my opinion, a person who is a picture of sanity would be in tune the irrationality, the harshness, the unexpected and the unknowns in life, but generally such people tend to act more abnormally because most people just accept what they see and hear and they don’t question. This makes them more stable and their behaviors more consistent, but if there are less human extremes and more consistency in personality and identity then less people and societies as wholes will be as stimulated to change and improve.
The categorical approach to mental disorders was first introduced when mental institutions realized they couldn’t just call every patient “insane” and they noticed differences between them. But the categorical approach is both primitive and counterproductive. Defining a mental disorder is difficult because, as I have said, a doctor can feel a patient is unhealthy while the person believes he or she is fine. Mental disorders are not like illnesses that affect other parts of the body like viral infections or cancer, which can be physically seen and treated often using the same medications. Bodily Ilnesses can’t be treated with cognitive behavioral therapy or by “thinking them away.” They are identified and diagnosed using scientific means, but mental “illnesses” are not. A perfectly healthy, “sane” individual can fake the symptoms of any mental disorder and be admitted for life. But you can’t “fake” high cholesterol or cancer. There is no refuting the existence of a bodily disease because there are scientific tests for them. A blood test can determine if you have cancer, but few scientific tests exist for mental disorders. People don’t get spinal taps to determine which nuero-transmitters are too abundant or scarce or which receptors are malfunctioning, and even if they had did doctors wouldn’t be able to know exactly what’s wrong (if anything) without talking to the patient extensively. Doctors most often make very subjective diagnoses based on the percieved behavior of the patient and on their biased beliefs, which have been shaped by doctors observations before them who taught what they know from their own experience. A diagnosis of a mental disorder is just a way to describe a group of symptoms. But these symptoms aren’t always caused by the same things nor should they always be treated in the same ways or treated at all in some cases. Doctors can’t view psychiatry as a way to “fix” minds. If a person’s brain is malfunctioning and this interferes with their quality of life this should be considered a mental disorder. But diagnosing a person with a mental disorder in order to describe a vague and broad set of behaviors and symptoms belittles the complexity of the human mind and oversimplifies that peson. Psychiatry should only be seen as a way to create health, as opposed to an approach to cure an illness because mental disorders are not illnesses.
Mental disorders are sets of cognitive and physical behaviors, not illnesses. But just because they’re behaviors doesn’t mean they’re always voluntary. Some are hard to control, some easy to control, and some impossible to control. But they are behaviors in the sense that they don’t infect people. Someone diagnosed with schizophrenia isn’t “sick” with schiozophrenia. You can inject someone with HIV, but you can’t inject someone with schizophrenia, and years of emotional trauma are rarely the cause of bodily diseases, whereas mental disorders are most often brought on by trauma. Schizophrenia behaviors don’t have a singular organic cause, nor do most behaviors that are symptomatic of mental disoders. Mental disorders are much more fluid and complicated than bodily illnesses. Most people can be treated with good talk therapy alone, whereas bodily illnesses usually require a physical substance to kill the disease .To think that any substance on earth would work for everyone diagnosed with a certain mental disorder is incredibly naive and foolish.
Most of the categories of mental disorders have subtypes called “not otherwise specified,” This demonstrates the need for a more fluid conception of mental health and disorders. People can’t be labeled and put into categories because people are all so different, so when doctors haven’t come up with a name for a set of behaviors and symptoms they tag the person as “not otherwise specified.” This too is an oversimplification and it often used to pathologize and/or institutionalize people with abnormal personality traits who don’t need medicine or hospitalization.
Even if a person has a malfunctioning brain that negatively affects their quality of life, this mental disorder can be very productive. Creative geniuses may have “shizoid” personalities that bother them, but they’re avoidance of social interaction and potential external criticism may help them create brilliant works. While their lifestyle may be unhealthy or could at least could be more enjoyable, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily something that has to be “fixed.” Strange people aren’t always sick people. Outliers are the most important people that exist because they can teach us the most about what makes people, “good” and “bad”, “strange” and “normal”; they can be a product of positive or negative social constructs and therefore help to change them by being physical examples. Positive and negative habits, behaviors, lifestyles and personal traits, both unwanted and wanted, are too often grouped together and labeled as a distinct mental illnesses when they shouldn’t be. Just about everything is made abnormal by psychiatry.
Schizoid personality disorder is one of the many examples of the arbitary, and unnecessary labels the mental health industry gives to certain lifestyles, behaviors and traits. A schizoid person is just a person who is socially withdrawn, overly sensitive, and introspective. These are simply normal human qualities. They are traits only a minority of people have, but this doesn’t mean they are necessarily detrimental. As Dr. Nancy McWilliams wrote, “One reason schizoid people are pathologized is because they are comparatively rare. People in majorities tend to assume that their own psychology is normative and to equate difference with inferiority”. (Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Second Edition: Understanding Personality. Pg. 196)
A person can be diagnosed as “schizoid” without determining whether or not this person perfers this lifestyle, which doesn’t make any sense. Having an active social life may be more healthy and enjoyable for most, but a person can also have many friends and still feel very alone. There is too much focus on observed behavior as I have said. And short periods of isolation can be very beneficial for most people. If a person is constantly stimulated by other people they have no time to reflect and look inside themselves and develop a very unique identity. People are also all at different stages of development. Some people need their alone time more than others and some other people need or thrive from constant interaction, so one lifestyle or another can’t be seen as always healthy or unhealthy. Lifestyles and behaviors also constantly change. One day a person may feel like a introverted hermit and the next feel like a convivial extrovert. Human mental health is simply different for everyone. People shouldn’t be given labels for traits. Identity is dynamic and “mental disorders” are too especially since most are not lifelong.
One of the symptoms of many mental disorders defined by the DSM is literally “unconventional beliefs” that go against “societal norms”. Every brilliant thinker who went against societal norms should be considered ill if unconventional beliefs are symptomatic of a mental disorder. Einstein should have been considered ill or Copernicus. Unconventional beliefs are what change conventional beliefs. Without them, society would never change. As Karl Marx has said “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” and this only keeps the ruling class in power and maintains the status quo. To believe that society will head in the right direction by conforming to the societal norms is foolish. The forces that control us define what’s normal. We don’t.
A mental disorder also can’t be diagnosed simply with observable behavior. The person’s feelings, thoughts, identity, beliefs, conscious and subscious, need to be taken into account. There’s also too much focus on the diagnosis rather than the reason for the diagnosis. Diagnoses of mental disorder stigmatize certain behaviors. They make those with them overly aware of the them, but they shouldn’t look at the behaviors as their problem, nor should the doctors. They should see what led to the unwanted behaviors as the problem and until those are addressed, people will just try to mask their symptoms or tone them down without getting to the heart of the real problem.
The spectrum approach to mental disorders attempts to explain a more broad variety behaviors and symptoms that can be overlapping. Because people with bipolar disorder, for example, are very different, a spectrum is used to describe more traits as bipolar. People with mental disorders need to be recognized as unique and individual, but coming up with names for more “subgroups” is a waste of time. You could say each person is their own sub group. Symptoms of a mental disorder should be recorded and treated on a case by case basis, based on what the individual wants and symptoms should not always be branded as distinct or concrete mental disorders. They can change because people change. There doesn’t need to be a name for every type of perceived flaw, abnormality, socially unacceptable trait or unwanted behavior.
Aside from the categorical approach to mental disorders and the mental health industry’s pathologizing of normal human differences, another problem with the industry lies in its psychoanalytic approach. The problem with the psychoanalytic approach is analogous to the uncertainty principle. Just as the equipment that measures the position of a particle changes its position, doctors change the outcome (resultant behavior) by observing it, which often leads to paranoid delusions and is used to validate pre-existing paranoid delusions, and ostensibly symptoms across the board worsen. Patients need to feel they’re under no pressure, which is impossible seeing as they’re kept there by force, constantly observed, and allowed almost no personal space. Mental institutions can’t be punishing. Hospitals are supposed to help people, so they can’t simultaneously be places of punishment, like prisons. It is completely contradictory.
Psychoanalysis is also flawed because it is not often approached as a conversation, but more like an interview or an interrogation at a court room. It is accusatory and demeaning and conducted by examining perceived behaviors and thoughts. Micheal Focault, a notable critic of psychiatry and mental insititutions argued that the asylum is “not a free realm of observation, diagnosis, and therapeutics; it is a juridical space where one is accused, judged, and condemned.” Usually a person’s highlights and best attributes aren’t explored and the psychiatrist says nothing about their own lives, which is incredibly important in order to establish trust and a psychiatric relationship that can be beneficial. When psychiatrists psychoanalyze they’re not looks for postiive attributes; they’re mostly looking for perceived negative traits. When a patient has a delusion doctors usually provoke them by asking questions that make them expand on their delusions. They provoke them to be more irrational and delusional, instead of asking why they believe in what they do and trying to help them adopt a more scientfic perspective.
I can’t see how psychiatrists could believe that someone with paranoid delusions would benefit from in depth psychoanalysis. Their job is to get in their heads, so it’s not surprising some patients believe doctors have literally entered their heads with recording equipment or some other delusion or that their thoughts are being “broadcast.” They are, after all, being constantly watched and recorded. Paranoid delusions and many symptoms of mental disorders are often created by mental institutions because patients have every reason to be paranoid. Usually if a person has paranoid delusions this enough to brand them as “paranoid schizophrenics.” But doctors define what constitutes paranoia and which fears are irrational or rational. If a patient is institutionalized against their will they have every reason to be paranoid or afraid. If they feel they’re in danger, they’re not paranoid; they’re right. Their actions are carefully monitored, they are fed drugs against their will (or threatened with confinement for not taking medication) and they are in danger as inmates are in prison. Mental institutions are not safe places. Patients are not just in danger from the staff, but also other patients. Therefore, doctors often provoke the very symptoms they believe are symptomatic of mental disorder and they use this as a justification for keeping them there.
Delusions of grandeur, another common symptom diagnosed in mental hospitals is also often brought on by doctors, and it’s often a hypocritical diagnosis. Psychiatrists are the ones with delusions of grandeur. They analyze humanity as if they’re “model human beings” who know what behaviors and ideologies are ideal when the reality is their lifestyles and behaviors represent a microcosm of society. Most therapists are straight, narrow minded, wealthy, well-educated people who live in developed countries. They don’t go to school to learn about different ideologies or cultures or people they wouldn’t otherwise wouldn’t talk to outside of an office setting. They also can’t understand people who have lived extremely different lives. How could a happy, rich, harvard graduate with no problems ever understand or relate to an institutionalized, crackhead diagnosed with schizophrenia and a history of trauma? Their lives couldn’t be more different. But doctors often label them with delusions of grandeur if they ever insinuate to know more about their disorder than doctors do.
Mental institutions if actually helpful would not be separated from society. They would be incorporated into it. Incarcerating a lot of people with perceived mental issues in a small place is not smart, nor is confining criminals together for the same reason. Mental patients should talk with other patients if they’d like, but they should be influenced and surrounded mostly by mentally healthy, happy people in order to facilitate improvement. When you have hundreds of mental patients all dealing with very different issues, there is no reason to expect improvement by grouping them together. You should only expect chaos. Similarly, when criminals are grouped together, they can organize and become better at crime. That’s all that is achieved. It reinforces the behavior they’re trying to eradicate.
In a mental institution that actually created mental health, patients would also not be carefully monitored, dehumanized and they would be allowed personal space. They would be stimulated creatively sharpening their skills, and also have the option to take classes on a range of subjects in order to facilitate independence. Doctors and nurses would be monitored the most by independent agencies and patient advocacy groups to prevent abuse. There would be a great focus on the establishment of personal relationships, and doctors would actually listen to patients and try to learn from them, as opposed to simply “correcting” them by highlighting their perceived problems. Perhaps most importantly, no patient should ever be held against their will if they have not committed a crime, and patients should have miranda rights (right to free counsel, right to remain silent, etc.) immediately when brought in involuntarily (or even voluntarily) for an evaluation. Mental institutions should also not have the ability to hold people for 10 days without a court hearing as they do.
Institutions for the criminally insane should also be renamed and reformed. Insane can’t be a legitimate legal term. Grouping patients together is an extremely bad idea. If a person has a mental disorder it can be difficult to determine how responsible he/she is for their actions. This is often determined by forensic psychiatrists in court, but they tend not to examine all the factors needed to actually make a determination about their accountability. How the disorder was brought on should matter in court, (genetics, external stressors, drugs, etc.) but it’s probably not considered often. If a person was physically unable to control him/herself, can’t remember the episode or was experiencing a hallucination and had no criminal intent, this should certainly be taken into account. However, if you define psychosis purely on the nature of the act, this doesn’t make any sense. People are capable of doing extremely sadistic, violent things without being technically psychotic. Therefore, a complete overhaul of the mental health sector is necessary. It should not be a for profit industry, and psychology and therapy need to be seen and practiced with a very different, open minded approach that allows for all different types of people to prosper and grow based on their own wants and needs
