In this post I present to the reader a series of links which soundly demonstrates that Big Pharma’s deceitful tactics in marketing their damaging drugs is endemic to the business. They don’t just deceive us or mislead us about psych meds. It’s all about protecting the patent as you will see when you do you own meta-analysis of these stories. About halfway through I add some commentary.

Levaquin. Antibiotic prescribed for sinus infections, bronchitis.

Levaquin causes your tendons to rupture. Mass tort action against Levaquin

Johnson and Johnson spending a lot of time suppressing information about the toxicity of Levaquin including editing Wikipedia, censoring toxic adverse event info from the entry.

Patient generated database on adverse reactions to Levaquin

Cipro. a cousin to Levaquin an antibiotic of the flouroquinilone family

Cipro joins the Black Box club article at LA Times.

Reader comments:

post by KM: “I had been on cipro 3 times in one year when both ACL’s detached from the bone attachments from an unseemingly simple twist.”

posted by David T. Fuller: “The fluoroquinolones are a known toxic chemotherapeutic agents that have been crippling patiients for almost forty years now. The FDA has failed miserably in providing adequate warnings for this class. Tendon ruptures is the least of the patient’s concerns. More than half of these drugs have been removed from clinical practice due to severe toxicity issues including fatalities. Irreversible peripheral neuropathy is yet another ignored side effect. Bryan should read the more than 4000 medical journal entries, case reports, newspaper articles, etc., to be found at www.fqresearch.org that clearly documents how dangerous these drugs are. This black box warning does little to nothing to bring to the patient’s attention that they risk being crippled for life after using this class”

Plavix. Blood thinner medication used for high blood pressure.

BristolMeyersSquibb sued in class action lawsuit for knowingly withholding health risks associated with using Plavix.

“This is a clear example of a pharmaceutical company putting profits before people,” said Nancy Hersh, Principle, Hersh and Hersh. “Bristol-Myers Squibb withheld information, misled the public and ignored warnings from the FDA, all to increase profits. They should be held accountable.”

Landmark study confirmed. Study results show that a diuretic, a ‘water pill’ outperformed a host of blood pressure medications.

Fen-Phen. Weight loss drug targeted primarily to obese women.

Highlights include:

Deceitful and false statements by drug reps. In one instance Wyeth rep protests that only 4 cases of pulmonary hypertension occurred. In actuality there were 41.

Wyeth attempts to get a new drug (new patent) approved. A medical officer from the FDA insists on black box warnings and refuses to approve the new drug. Wyeth goes around this doctor to the FDA management. Drug is approved by FDA management without black box warnings and the cases of heart valve damage or pulmonary hypertension increase 23 fold in women who take the drugs.

Lipitor. Cholesterol lowering ’statin’ drug.

Lipitor class actions begin. Medical misinformation alleged. Lower cholesterol levels does not reduce the chance of heart disease. Low cholesterol may shorten lifespan. Cholesterol needed in body to make hormones, run well.

Lipitor class action expanding. Cover up alleged

Vioxx: pain relief medication for inflammatory conditions.

How the Vioxx tragedy started.

FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market.

Maker of Vioxx is accused of deception.

Two teams of researchers with access to thousands of documents gathered for lawsuits over the painkiller Vioxx allege that Merck waged a campaign of deception to promote its drug, moving slowly to warn of possible hazards while at the same time dressing up in-house studies as the work of independent academic researchers.

The reports in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association in effect accuse one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical makers of various forms of scientific fraud.

Prilosec.  For acid reflux ‘disease’.  Another made up medical condition like high cholesterol, ’social anxiety disorder’ and bipolar 2 that needs treatment. Basically heavy-duty heartburn and indigestion caused by too much of the Good Life.

Class action lawsuit against Prilosec. Complaint alleges AstraZeneca/Proctor and Gamble ‘intentionally and uniformly’ withheld side effects information.

History repeats itself with Nexium. Class action lawsuit against AZ over Nexium.

‘Europe’s second-largest drugmaker AstraZeneca is being sued by a coalition of consumer activists who claim its blockbuster heartburn drug, Nexium, the Purple Pill, is no more effective than its over-the-counter drug Prilosec.

The coalition on Monday filed a class action lawsuit against AstraZeneca, alleging that the company sought to reserve its market share and profits as the patent on Prilosec was set to expire, by initiating a massive and misleading advertising and promotional campaign to deceive consumers into purchasing Nexium, a nearly identical new drug.’

Adderall.  ADHD medication

Canada yanks Adderall from shelves after many sudden death incidents in children. But in the US in 2006 the castrated FDA failed to issue Black Box warnings never mind suspending distribution.

Valium, Lorazapam. Anti-anxiety medication.

Benzodiazepines have a unique history in that they were responsible for the largest ever class action lawsuit against drug manufacturers in the United Kingdom, involving 14,000 patients and 1,800 law firms that alleged the manufacturers knew of the dependence potential but intentionally withheld this information from doctors.

Lamictal, Depakote. Anti-seizure medications.

Black box warnings about suicidal tendencies by people taking these drugs mandated by FDA after way too many suicides. Independent advisory panel to the FDA claims black box warning, ‘inappropriate’. Any guesses as to how much pharma money these independent advisers rake in yearly?

Epileptic moms give their offspring cleft palate, spina bifida, autism and a host of other birth defects, as a result of taking Lamictal or Depakote while pregnant.

Side effects from Lexapro, Lamictal, Depakote from the women who take them. These are the real documented side effects generated not by a drug insert but by the patient’s experience.

Gianna’s Lamictal withdrawal from Hell post. With over 9000 over 17,000 views and counting.

Lamictal no better than placebo. GlaxoSmithKline knew this when they marketed the drug.

Neurontin. another anti-seizure med. prescribed off-label for just about everything.

Neurontin class action.

“Neurontin was FDA approved only as a powerful epilepsy drug for adjunctive or supplemental use. Under FDA provisions a company must specify the intended uses of a drug in new drug application to the federal agency. Only if the FDA approves it can a company then market or promote it. Pfizer pleaded guilty to criminal charges that its Warner-Lambert subsidiary, which Pfizer bought in 2000, promoted Neurontin for off-label uses that lacked any type of scientific support.”

“Pfizer has been sentenced to pay $240 million, which is the second largest criminal fine ever imposed in a health care fraud prosecution according to the Justice Department. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went into Pfizer’s efforts to promote such off-label uses like bipolar mental disorder, pain disorders, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, attention deficit disorder, migraines, drug and alcohol withdrawal seizures, restless leg syndrome, and as a first line monotherapy treatment for epilepsy. Scientific studies had already shown Neurontin was not an effective treatment as a monotherapy for epileptic seizures, and the FDA already rejected its solo use.

Patients are angered by the realization that their Neurontin prescriptions may have been based on false and misleading information that was part of a financial scheme.”

Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil. Anti-depressants.

Phizer sued in California for covering up effects of Zoloft.

Coverup of Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor side effects.

SSRI makers under fire: Misrepresenting studies, concealing reports, off labeling for unapproved conditions, ghostwriting, pretty much standard operating procedure.

Funny ironic thing that so-called anti-depressants cause suicide. Not so funny is the fact that they cause homicidal impulses. Seems not too many people know they could be in for a murder rap after starting or stopping SSRIs. Ask your doctor if a manslaughter conviction is right for your depression.

Antidepressant efficacy and side effects, widespread concealing and washing of negative data by pharmaceutical corporations.

Paxil suicide data suppressed.

Yes, it appears the makers of Paxil may have been a bit disingenuous in their publication of the risks of suicide associated with their medication back in the early 1990s. The U.S. Senate has made available an in-depth report (4 MB PDF) written by Joseph Glenmullen, a Harvard psychiatry professor, who examined the drug company’s data on Paxil. There apparently were some serious discrepancies in the original researchers’ data analysis.

One of those discrepancies was a pretty big one — that Paxil resulted in a suicide rate 8 times greater than a sugar pill. That’s a huge, major difference.

The researchers were clever in their cover-up. They included 2 people who apparently committed suicide before the study even began and attributed their suicides to the placebo control group. Nobody, of course, would’ve ever discovered this creative data interpretation if it weren’t for a lawsuit filed against GlaxoSmithKline (the makers of Paxil) in California.

Dr John Grohol. Psych Central

New study, most antidepressants, SSRI medications fail to beat a placebo for treating depression. So much for all those studies given to the FDA to get approval which require a prospective drug to prove it is clinically efficacious. Apparently these drugs are only efficacious when the pharma industry or one of their minion psychiatry professors handles the study.

Seroquel, Zyprexa, Abilify. ‘Atypical’ Anti-psychotic medications.

We inherit the phrase ‘chemical lobotomy’ from psychiatrists in the the 1950s who were describing the effects of Thorazine on patients. Originally a chemical used in dyes Big Pharma inherited phenothiazines from the agricultural industry where these compounds were used as pesticides. If you are accidentally exposed to phenothiazines you are supposed to get first aid and medical treatment to avoid death.

The early generation neuroleptics were drugs used primarily in mental institutions and continued treatment for people who were discharged from them. Under the Soviet regime political dissenters were hospitalized, diagnosed with ‘Slowly progressing schizophrenia’ a condition that causes the patient to have thoughts about justice and freedom and were given Haldol to shut down the area of the brain responsible for those thoughts, the frontal lobes.

At some point in the 80s and 90s Big Pharma decided more people should be enjoying neuroleptic induced iatrogenesis. They knew that Thorazine, Perphenazine, Haldol all had a bad rap as having horrendous side effects in addition to the ‘lobotomy’ stigma. In order to sell neuroleptics to the masses they needed to remake the image of these toxins.

Atypical antipsychotics were the result of this image make over. New names and slight tweakings in the same basic molecule structure led to new patents. The ads featured the brand name suspended above the heads of twenty-something slim women in yoga poses in the mountains. Unfortunately these drugs are anything but healthy for the mind, body and soul.

New prescriptions led to new side effects the majority of which Big Pharma knew about and actively concealed or denied. Extreme weight gain. Diabetes. Fugue. Akathasia. No real evidence that this generation of neuroleptics is any less toxic or more effective than the first generation ‘typical’ meds.

The long, convoluted, documented history behind Zyprexa misinformation

AstraZeneca wants to conceal evidence of Seroquel problems from patients, world.

Eli Lilly documents reveal ghostwriters were used to market Zyprexa.

Actual criminals conducting effectiveness studies on Seroquel clinical trials

Eli Lilly loses effort to censor Zyprexa documents from the internet.

Zyprexa documents now online. Some commentary.

Suppressed research. Seroquel Study 15 shows Seroquel not effective.

Seroquel Documents. Company told reps to lie

A minion of Big Pharma, Harvard psychiatrist Joe Biederman assures drug maker of positive study outcomes for Risperdal. Before the study actually occurs.

AstraZeneca can’t exlude expert witness testimony from Seroquel trial.

AstraZeneca hid evidence of substantial weight gain from doctors, patients.

Abilify law suit settlement.

“The allegations were that these companies not only engaged in a pattern of kickbacks and false reporting to drive up both the sales and prices for its drugs, they also encouraged health care providers to prescribe a potent drug to both children and seniors for uses that had not been approved by the FDA,” Georgia Attorney General Thurbert Baker said in a prepared statement. “The drive to make certain that the bottom-line meets Wall Street expectations can never justify defrauding the taxpayers or putting our most vulnerable citizens at risk.”

Are antipsychotics a chemical lobotomy? is the question asked at this site.

Originally posted by user SpiritualSuffering, April 2008 in response.

Several family members and friends have been taking psychiatric drugs for many years. Now, they all have tardive dyskensia and akathsisia.

One of my sisters and one of my friends developed an inoperable blister in the membrane around the brain. They both developed relentlessly severe and incapacitating headaches. The pressure caused bleeding in my sister’s brain, sending her into a coma and almost killing her. They had to drill holes in her skull to relieve the pressure. The blister in my friend’s brain divided into four smaller blisters, dispersing the pressure and relieving some of the pain.

The funny thing is that even while taking the drugs they were still depressed, anxious and manic.

How can we accept information about mental illnesses and treatments from mental health advocacy organizations when they are bought out by Big Pharma?

The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance sells space to presenters of ‘products relating to treatment of depression and bipolar’ at DBSA conferences. That is a euphemism for psychiatric drugs. DBSA also has a recurring contest called ‘Facing Us’ and ‘Share your story’ with prize money sponsored by AstraZeneca, a long term DBSA partner.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill gets over half it’s funding from a variety of Big Pharma corps.

How can we trust the so called experts when these people are bought out by Big Pharma?

Senate probe uncovers conflicts of interest and payouts to Harvard bipolar and adhd researchers.

Introducing Dr. Charles Nemeroff:

Dr Nemeroff’s role in the prostitution of research is legendary. In April 2004, Shannon Brownlee, author of, “Overtreated,” wrote an article in the Washington Monthly entitled, “Doctors Without Borders,” after he was caught failing to disclose his financial ties to the companies whose treatments he promoted in a paper in Nature Neuroscience, and noted:

“With financial ties to nearly two dozen drug and biotech companies, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff may hold some sort of record among academic clinicians for the most conflicts of interest.

“A psychiatrist, a prominent researcher, and chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral science at Emory University in Atlanta, Nemeroff receives funding for his academic research from Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Wyeth-Ayerst–indeed from virtually every pharmaceutical house that manufactures a drug to treat mental illness.

“He also serves as a consultant to drug and biotech companies, owns their stocks, and is a member of several speakers’ bureaus, delivering talks–for a fee–to other physicians on behalf of the companies’ products.”

Introducing Harvard psychiatrist and the Don of the Harvard child bipolar mafia:

Dr. Joe Biederman.

Bierderman is God’s gift to children with bipolar.

If you are a teenager who smokes and or drinks you too are also bipolar, according to Joe.

Biederman fails to disclose all the ducats he rakes in from his masters.

Influential Harvard psychiatrist guarantees the positive efficacy results of risperdone before the clincial study actually takes place.

In a contentious Feb. 26 deposition between Dr. Biederman and lawyers for the states, he was asked what rank he held at Harvard. “Full professor,” he answered.

“What’s after that?” asked a lawyer, Fletch Trammell.

“God,” Dr. Biederman responded.

“Did you say God?” Mr. Trammell asked.

“Yeah,” Dr. Biederman said.

If you can’t trust the ads on TV and you can’t trust mental health advocacy groups and you can’t trust Ivy League professors who can you trust?

The history shown here is a pattern of behavior on the part of pharma. They create these drugs and file patents. Newly patented drugs sell for much more than generics. For the duration of the patent individual drug corporations will, through direct actions, lobbying and the use of PR firms:

• Promote pseudoscience i.e. ‘chemical imbalance’, ‘oppositional defiance’, ‘high cholesterol’
• Create misleading advertising for direct to consumer marketing.
• Purchase favorable opinions from expert consultants
• Pressure doctors to prescribe the newest drugs.
• Pressure doctors to prescribe the newest drugs ‘off-label’ a practice generally condemned by the FDA for unapproved conditions.
• Wash studies and suppress negative adverse reaction reports in order to spin the latest drugs in a good light and protect their sales.
• When they finally get busted misleading consumers, lying, fabricating studies, paying off doctors and denying the truth they have known all along about how worthless their drugs are their apology comes not to the consuming public at large for their pain, misery and deaths but to the investors for increasing their blood pressure.
• After they get busted they don’t take their licks like a good sport but instead they usually sue the courts to keep all the incriminating evidence, the internal memos, the suppressed studies confidential and classified.

I had never heard of acid reflux disease until I started seeing the Prilosec ads which were marketed for treating it in the late 1990s. What is acid reflux disease? It’s the result of repeated over-consumption.

You ate too much spicy or greasy foods and you have heartburn and your digestive acids are regurgitating in your throat. You do this every night for a while and it might be easy to forget that indigestion is natural. Next thing you know you buying Prilosec when the common sense solution was to eat moderate portions and eat a little healthier and the indigestion would clear up naturally.

My GP and I have had a years long battle of wills over my cholesterol. Higher than normal levels of cholesterol run in my family. Why I don’t know but I assume it is natural physiological variance. Genetics. We don’t have a history of heart disease in our family.

My doctor has practically begged me to go on statins after seeing my my fasting blood test results. I have always refused. Sometimes politely sometimes not so much.

Lipitor is the drug she always wants me to try. Her office is plastered with Lipitor displays with pamphlets, Lipitor inserts and Lipitor post-it memo pads. No wonder she has Lipitor on the brain.

I’ve gone through so many hoops to try to lower my LDL levels to make her stop worrying and nagging me about it. I have a pre-fasting diet I evolved that I used to try to force my LDL down in the week before a blood lab.

A strict vegetarian diet which omits all possible cholesterol culprits. A diet which omits eggs, butter, milk, chicken, cheese. No mayo, salad dressings, fried foods. Pretty much anything with grease, oil or fat was out. I ate oat cereals, nuts, broccoli,  fruit. The diet always makes me feel wan and hollow. It does not provide enough energy for my exercise and thinking requirements.

Other than having a fatty diet I have no other risk for heart disease. I don’t smoke. I am not obese. My blood pressure is that of an athlete. My body craves fats and I function better, physically and mentally when I eat fatty foods.  I was getting pretty tired of my doctor freaking out and insisting I go on statins so I went online and started doing my homework.

It turns out we need cholesterol. We require cholesterol to function properly. Cholesterol is a building block for cell membrane repairs and is a precursor for hormones like pregnenalone, DHEA, estrogen, testosterone and others. It is a myth that low cholesterol prevents heart disease.

The cholesterol lies are just another Big Pharma machination. Look at how much information is on the internet when you google phrases like ‘bad cholesterol’, ‘good cholesterol’, ‘high cholesterol’ and so on. There is no such thing as good or bad cholesterol and lowering your LDL won’t save you from heart disease. It’s more of the same kind of stoic adherence to pseudoscience that Big Pharma is known for.

I met a person once who was on Lipitor for high cholesterol for awhile. He had a host of disabling side effects from following his doctors advice to get his LDL numbers down. The scare tactics his doctor and my doctor used are first rate.

“We don’t want to see you have a heart attack when you are thirty!”

I was very skeptical of the lowering LDL hype because of bad past experiences with pharmaganda so I did research. This guy I met did not. As a result he now had a condition in which his nerves were decaying causing organ and muscle damage.

He lurched and shuffled when he walked. He slurred his words when he spoke. His lips were dry, cracked and bleeding. All this just for trying to make his doctor happy by lowering his LDL numbers. It was horrible to see a young and decent man decaying slowly from within. I wondered if my doctor had ever laid eyes on someone who had experienced this.

This guy knew that I was trained in some pretty effective physical therapy techniques. Namely, tai chi chuan and spinal chi gung. He wanted help. There was nothing I could do for him short of taking him on as as a full time, live-in student/patient which neither of us could do at the time.

Had he himself known tai chi before he came down with his condition he might have been able to regenerate himself. Tai chi has been known to stabilize and even reverse nerve and muscle damaging conditions like multiple sclerosis. He could barely do even the simplest techniques without pain and malfunction. His disorder was progressive and continued despite discontinuing Lipitor. Neuropathy and neuromuscular degeneration from these statin drugs is well documented but little understood.

Social anxiety disorder? It is normal for people to be shy and have anxiety being around people. It’s also normal that some people will naturally be even more sensitive and anxious and shy about being around other people or groups. This normal behavior has become pathologized at about the same time drugs came out to treat the condition.

Depression is just a chemical imbalance is another pharma lie. The chemical imbalance nonsense has been debunked yet the media still does not question it. Big Pharma keeps propagating this myth that mental illness is caused by these unknown chemical imbalances. The wording of the medication inserts is always written with weasel word statements like.

“It is thought that the medication works by rebalancing the chemicals in the brain.”

Since they don’t know how depression, schizophrenia, bipolar or borderline are actually caused how can they design smart medications which address these imbalances? When I think about some of the meds used to treat bipolar disorder for example, these are the kinds of troubling and skeptical questions I tend to ask right away.

I remember when Prozac the ‘wonder’ drug came out. I was sort of on the front lines since I was a teenager in the mental health system living in group homes. I had Prozac pimped at me out of the blue by several psychologists and psychiatrists and I had never asked for a drug. It was like they had a compulsion to push this stuff.

One day one of the boys in the placement went into seizures on the floor of the dining room at breakfast. He had started taking Prozac. I have always been a student of science reading everything I could about any and all science. I saw that and I did not believe back then that brain science and biochemistry had advanced to the point where we could honestly say we had figured out all the ins and outs of neurotransmitters.

As a consequence my skin crawls just a little in memory of those psychs pushing me to take Prozac when today we know so many people have had so many problems with SSRIs.

Anti-high blood pressure meds. Anti-obesity meds. Anti-cholesterol meds. Anti-indigestion meds. Anti-biotic meds. Anti-depressant meds. Anti-anxiety meds. Anti-seizure meds. Anti-psychotic meds. Anti. Anti. Anti.

The Anti-X medication is a short cut that leads some folks to disability and even death. Many of the conditions Anti-X meds treat are made up in order to sell new or old drugs. Others conditions Anti-X medications treat end up with paradoxical events that worsen the existing conditions.

If it seems to good to be true then it probably is is what we are told when we want to evaluate possible scams. Quick fixes are too much to ask for. There must be a price to pay when you take short cuts or lose touch with common sense, common knowledge and normalcy.

How did the old timers solve these problems before the era of meds? Some people became drunks or morphine addicts. When we have access to substances we tend to use them.

Once upon a time women knew that post partum depression was a normal, natural consequence of the process of childbirth. If they were lucky they had family and friends to help support them until it passed. If they were frontier types they had to suffer it and get over it naturally while tending the family. Now some women are encouraging legislation that would force all new mothers to be screened for depression and treated with drugs for it as if post partum depression was something a woman needed to be saved from rather than endured.

For that matter open up any book on male or female puberty and there is an interesting fact you will find in these books regardless of gender. Puberty causes hormonal surges. Hormonal surges can cause mood swings that include irritability, depression, insomnia, grandiosity, hyperactivity and so on. Stress also causes many of the same symptoms.

Why are parents even permitting their teens to take any drugs for bipolar, anxiety, depression or inattentiveness? It’s totally natural for a pubescent teen under stress situations to have mood swings, aggression, depression, self esteem issues and so on.

Combine social pressure, stress and puberty and you are going to have an emotional teen. How exactly do you discriminate between a bipolar depressive phase or a bipolar manic phase from stress reactions and puberty Ma? Doc? Can you show me the difference in a PET or MRI? How can you justify the label, the stigma, the dangerous drugs if you don’t know and you can’t know?

Part of becoming a complete mature adult human being is getting a grip on our feelings, impulses and behaviors. We shouldn’t be medicated out of life experiences like bereavement, puberty and post partum depression or we lose part of the human experience. It diminishes us and forces us to live in chemically altered states that are a false reality.

In addition to re-educating ourselves that you are supposed to suffer mood swings and anxiety because it’s the human condition we can educate ourselves on how to remedy all sorts of problems without resorting to pills.

You can lower your own blood pressure by learning to relax and eat better. You can learn biofeedback and meditation both proven to lower blood pressure. They both take effort and time.

You can lose weight even if you are obese. There is one universal formula for guaranteed weight loss. You must burn more calories than you consume. That basically means exercising, working out, making effort. Overcoming inertia. Discipline. You didn’t become obese over night and it’s a bit much to expect a miracle pill which will do all the work you are supposed to be doing.

You can overcome panic attacks and social anxiety with cognitive behavioral therapy and desensitization. Meditation, a time consuming and challenging practice can give you the same effects as cognitive training and desensitization. It’s normal to be anxious. Some people have more anxious temperaments than others and we forget that.

You can avoid the anti-indigestion pills by eating in moderation and avoiding meds that interfere with the natural chemical balance of your stomach. If you are going to stuff yourself expect to regurgitate acid because that’s part of the deal. It’s natural.

You can avoid antibiotics for most things.  They are way over-prescribed.  If you are reasonably healthy and do not suffer from immune challenges than there is no reason to ask for or accept an antibiotic for a sinus infection or bronchitis or the flu. Most ear infections do not require antibiotics.

You can avoid antidepressants. Studies have shown them to be largely ineffective and highly addictive to boot. There is usually a good underlying reason for being depressed or having depression feelings.

Depression can result from:

• Stress
• Sickness
• Death of friends, loved ones
• Puberty
• Pregnancy and birth
• Shock and trauma
• Irregular sleep patterns
• Hormone irregularities
• Malnutrition
• Allergies and exposure to toxins
• Institutionalization
• Changing seasons and climate. Reduced exposure to sunlight.
• Lack of purpose
• Lack of self respect and or self love

Knowledge. Simply knowing too many troubling things can get you depressed. Maybe you can’t stop reading murder reports in the news or following wars or politics and it gets you down. Having the weight of the world on your conscience.

Your religious beliefs or lack of can cause you depression. When I was very young religion was a positive influence in my life. During my teens it really sank in what it meant if there was a God who knew all things and knew my every thought and who watched me nonstop. I became obsessed, anxious and depressed that I never had any psychic privacy ever. It slowly etched away at my sanity until I unlearned my beliefs.

When you arrive at the conclusion that you are depressed you should go over that check list before you ask for or accept antidepressants. Your depressive condition might be existential and require spiritual guidance or it may pass with time such as pubescent mood swings and post partum depression.

Most of the conditions that can be ‘Anti-ed’ by a medication can also be treated without medications. Other medications can be avoided if we consume in moderation and do our own homework.

The problem with the non drug remedies is that they are not necessarily fast or easy. It takes time to learn biofeedback and to exercise. Self discipline is needed to enjoy life in some semblance of moderation. Self education is needed to eat right and stay away from bad stuff. Taking good care of yourself is work!

Meditation for example is a powerful self healing method that has been proven to:

• Lower blood pressure and reduce stress
• Beat out psych meds and placebos in treating depression
• Reduce anxiety and build up attention span
• Help get over phobias and conditionings.
• Settle down racing thoughts
• Improve sleep
• Resolve or mitigate chronic pain and tension

So why don’t more people meditate? Meditation is challenging and time consuming. It is not a quick fix. Results are gradual and come steadily over time. Patience must be cultivated and Americans are not very patient people generally speaking. Anti-X pills offer an easy, mindless and relatively quick-seeming treatment. It comes as no surprise really that people pressure their doctors and demand these medications.

Popping a pill and moving on with your day is infinitely easier than learning to go within. It’s faster than taking the time to explore your inner world and master for yourself how your thoughts and emotions really work. To take responsibility at the level of thought and awareness for the content and experiences of your inner world is beyond a lot of people.

I think part of the reason Big Pharma is so successful at the ‘anti-everything’ drug business is due to how separated we have become from common sense and a culturally ingrained, media promoted sense of entitlement to quick fixes. Another factor is their marketing. Their advertising strategies work. In a recent communication sent to me a young man was complaining  of emotional flatness, mental fog and fatigue from a month of Abilify.

“I saw a million commercials for it (Abilify). I thought it had to be safe.”

Can you spot all the problems with this Zoloft commercial? Take the challenge. My answers under the video.

Cute and cuddly animations? Child psychologists and artists help create an ad that will attract younger, less skeptical viewers and brand them with the name Zoloft

Zoloft-

“While the cause is unknown depression may be related to an imbalance of chemicals between the nerve cells in the brain.”

They tell you that they have no idea how depression is caused. ‘May be related’ is not ‘known to be caused by the following imbalances.’

“Prescription Zoloft works to correct this chemical imbalance”

Wait. What? How? You just admitted you don’t know how it works! How can it correct something if you if they don’t even know what that something is?

“You just shouldn’t have to feel this way any more”

Marketers project a false sense of privilege and entitlement. Like spa and resort vacation commercials. Like Burger King’s ‘Have it your way’ slogan. Marketing culture promotes the idea that you are special, just because.

“Zoloft is non-habit forming”

More deceit. They don’t tell you about the protracted tapering or the agony of withdrawal.when you decide to discontinue. They don’t tell you that you may need books that teach you how to get off your brain’s addiction to Zoloft.

“??? ???Censored ??? ??”

Deceit by omission. The chipper and personable young man who voices the Zoloft ad fails to mention that Zoloft might cause you to kill yourself. Strange effects from so called anti-depressants. The ad failed to mention that you might kill your baby soon after starting Zoloft. The ad failed to mention you might kill yourself and your baby if you take Zoloft.

He doesn’t mention you might want to go on a vehicle assisted killing spree if you take Zoloft or execute your kindly grandparents. and then burn down their house. This stuff is like Resident Evil drug zombie horror.

When he says Zoloft has sexual side effects he doesn’t mention that not even Viagra will resurrect your libido after being on Zoloft for awhile. It’s not your blood circulation that is damaged but your sexual arousal pathways in your brain.

“When you know more about what’s wrong you can help make it right.”

I beg pardon? Didn’t you guys establish the fact that the cause of depression is unknown right at the beginning? Why should we believe you? How can you know how to right something when you admit you don’t understand what’s wrong ? I can take the insult to my intelligence only so far.

In the final analysis we find ourselves forced to be our own consumer advocates. We have to ask penetrating questions regarding the facts we are told by our doctors or the ads being presented on TV or in printed media. We have to look out for ourselves.  We have to pay attention and do our own research so we don’t get caught in Big Pharma’s deceit and subsequently allow ourselves to be harmed by their damaging drugs. Even if it means passing up on the quick and easy fix.

Many sources were located and browsed to make this post. Litigation firms, Youtube, Google, LA Times, NY Times, Boston Globe online. PLos Medicine. CL Psych and many other blog sites. In particular I thank Philip Dawdy for his tireless reporting on Big Pharma’s shenanigans at Furious Seasons as the largest single source for these links and material.

I end this post with these stories and links.

Chemotherapy kickbacks influence prescribing patterns.

The aftermath of Prozax, Zoloft, Luvox, Fen-Phen and other serotogenic drugs

Worse than Vioxx. Risperdal, Zyprexa, Clozaril and Paxil kill Americans by the thousands

Fourteen drug companies cited for misleading ads on Google.

18 out of 20 APA policymakers with ties to Big Pharma

I found this interesting article about schizophrenics and smoking at Brain Blogger recently. Since I have a blog this is the perfect place to get on a soapbox and rant a little about the topic.

Before I cured myself of schizophrenia, bipolar and ptsd I was a smoker. I started when I was fifteen as soon as I got out of a horrible psych group home for teens. I needed to cope with how little control over my life I had and the things people would do to me. I asked my foster father why he smoked and he told me it was to relax and calm down. I promptly asked for a couple of his Winstons and I was a smoker thereafter.

Smoking served several purposes for me back then. I was not allowed to smoke in the house. Anytime I wanted to smoke I had to go outside. This turned out to be in my favor as anytime I wanted to chill out and be by myself unsupervised I just went outside to have my smoke.

I found a nice big pine tree with branches so dense that it offered some shelter from the New England rain and showers. It gave me some space and time to think. I could let down my guard for a few minutes and chill.

For years after I continued to smoke. Once I had a job at the local Dunkin Donuts at the age of sixteen I could afford my own habit and it was not long before I was smoking a half a pack or more.

I got into trouble pursuing and defending my ‘right to smoke’ as a minor. After the foster home I ended up in other groups homes and did another go around inpatient. By then I was a smoker and I would be damned if some resident staff or psych nurse or program rule was going to stop me from smoking.

It became my single act of rebellion in those places. I built up trust from weeks long compliance with structure and as soon as I had a structure level where I could be out of sight with on-grounds privileges I always hid a stash of smokes somewhere. Usually a pack of smokes, wrapped in a baggie with matches tucked inside the box. I hid them in ceilings and under rocks.

Sooner or later I got busted. A non smoker staff got too close to me when I came back on the unit and smelled the smoke on me. The balloon would go up. The staff would go in a frenzy and start tearing my stuff apart.

I would taunt them and laugh at them when they did it.

“What, do you think I am an idiot? You think I would permit you the pleasure of confiscating my ‘contraband’ by stashing it my room? You people are such tools. In less than 300 days I will be 18 and you can’t stop me from smoking as much as I want, where I want and when I want. Go ahead and search. You will never find them you f***ing hypocritical morons who go outside and smoke on your lunch breaks.”

They never did find my smokes. It was glorious to frustrate the staff like that. Then all it took was going into a different, less restrictive program and suddenly anyone who was a smoker could go outside and smoke on the porch.

All those room searches and level demotions and furious and frantic staff searching for my stash. It was all in vain. My anger would just burn in my veins like lava thinking about those room searches and now here I was sitting on a rickety old rocking chair on a porch smoking to my hearts content.

It was a small personal victory of me versus the system to have never been caught with cigarettes or in the act of smoking while I was in those programs.  To deliberately disobey structure and do what I wanted and get away with it. It was a way for me to take control of my life in some small way.

A few months later I was a legal adult and the entire issue became moot. In my first apartment I had an ashtray by my bed. Before I opened my eyes my hands would grope for my pack and lighter. With cigarette between lips I would get up and go make coffee.

I did not know at the time but I would only be a smoker for four more years.

Flash forward and now I am twenty-two. I live 3000 miles away from all my abusers and those institutions and most of my friends and family. I had made a vow to pursue a holistic lifestyle and to dedicate my life to the study of meditation, internal martial arts and yoga.

At some point that year I quit smoking. It was very painful emotionally and psychologically. Intellectually I knew I would be healthier and that this was a good change for the better. Getting over the nicotine addiction, while also painful, was not the main problem.

For the longest time I dallied before completely quitting. I switched to lights. I tried to make smoking a ritual act and not an automatic, mindless process of lighting up whenever I had the impulse. I tapered myself down to 1-2 smokes in the morning (usually with coffee) and 1-2 smokes in the evening (usually after meals).

After awhile I got fed up with my procrastination and inability to sever the habit completely. When I asked myself honestly what my problem was, the answer was, I didn’t want to quit. I liked smoking. It was a part of me and who I was. Therein lay the problem.

Smoking had become part of my core sense of who I was. I am not exaggerating when I say almost all my family members and almost all my friends were smokers. I was not just getting a fix. Smoking was a communal, social interaction for me.

My father and I would smoke together on New Years. My brother was heavy smoker. When I hung out with my friends we might pass a joint around and afterward one person would light up and almost unconsciously and simultaneously everyone else would light up too.

Smoking had become like a good friend to me. I knew that if I quit smoking that I would not be able to tolerate people smoking around me. Some smokers homes are rank and even nauseating. Since most of my friends smoked cigs that meant that after we all smoked the joint I went home. I couldn’t stick around and breathe the subsequent nicotine haze.

The hardest part for me in all this was seeing myself as a person who did not smoke. My mental image of myself was a smoker. It was part of who I was not just a habit.

What ended up sealing the deal was a chance newspaper article or something I read in a health magazine or something like that. This was in the late 90s and that was when Big Tobacco was fielding massive class action law suits. The documents came out and told the truth about cigarettes.

Cigarettes have been engineered to get you addicted. That was all there was to it. These tobacco scientists had taken all the data on addictions and neurotransmitters and brain receptors and deliberately engineered a substance that messed around with your dopamine.

When I read that I was infuriated. I had never had a choice in the matter really. I was born to a smoking mother who smoked when she carried me. I was raised  in a smoking home breathing in my mother’s morning cigarette smoke while eating Cheerios before school.

It was fait accompli. My brain had been primed for dopamine addiction from the womb.The first cigarette I ever smoked was like coming home. It was already too late for me from the get go.

I was so enraged that I hurled my pack of smokes across the room where they fell behind an easy chair and lay forgotten for a year before I found them and gave them to a friend. I shattered my own addiction through sheer will. No hypnosis or patch or gum. I quit cold turkey and that was the end of it.

Then one day I tried an experiment. I borrowed a smoke from a friend. Took it home. In the privacy of my apartment I lit it and took one puff and put it out. Then I listened very carefully to my internal world. When you are fully conscious and present and you pay attention to how your body feels you can learn how substances effect you.

I realized that nicotine was a poison. It made me sick. My mouth tasted like ashes. The smell was horrid. The nicotine racing through my veins actually agitated me causing my thoughts to churn and my stomach as well. I realized most folks don’t pay attention like that. I would guess that almost every smoker noticed that effect the first time they smoked a cigarette but it does not stop them and then after awhile of smoking you don’t notice it anymore.

Here, alone in my apartment, meditating after taking a single puff I knew this was highly toxic. I cared about myself these days. I didn’t want to hurt myself or make myself sick. Although I partially regretted taking the puff it was a good experiment because it showed me that smoking makes you toxic and without a doubt effects your mind, body and feelings and not for the better.

Because of the unique experiences in my life I will forever associate smoking with mental health problems. People that have self esteem issues and hate themselves, their body, their life are not going to think twice about smoking. To them, it’s another nail in their coffin. (my brother’s own words actually).

Not all smokers are mental cases. Some people can genuinely recreationally smoke now and then and it’s not a big deal. It’s like any other recreational substance. These are people who can have a few drinks or do a line of coke or have a few smokes and they are not addicted. They recreate, they don’t self medicate.

A lot of people with mental health issues are self medicating. These folks are not smoking one or two smokes a day or a week. They go through 1-2 packs a day or more. When I was in the mental health system almost everyone I encountered was a smoker. I smoked like that too when I use to suffer from bipolar and schizophrenia.

Then I take a look at the healthiest people I knew around the time I quit and none of them smoked. My aikido and yoga teachers did not smoke. My tai chi and meditation teachers did not smoke. These were people who not only possessed good physical health but good mental health too.

Then I looked back at my friends and family. At least two of my friends had explosive tempers and they were heavy smokers. My mother, a depressive her entire life has always been a smoker. My brother who suffers from occasional bouts of depression is a smoker too.

Smoking may seem to be medication or a ‘coping stick’ but it is not. The health of your body, brain and internal organs effects your mental health and emotional outlook on life. Major smoking is self abuse that takes a toll on your entire body. Basically if you chain smoke and you have mental illness you are making it worse for yourself.

There is a saying about a sound mind in a sound body. If you smoke like that you working against your own recovery. Perhaps one of the best things someone with mental illness could do would be to quit smoking. No more artificially induced ups and downs, no more ‘nic fits’, no more dependency. Your entire health will rebound. You will get more oxygen which will help you think better. In time your energy will bounce back which can combat lethargy or lack of motivation.

You become more physically attractive when you don’t smoke. You smell better. Your skin and hair looks better. You have more endurance and better blood pressure. You remove a toxin which was negatively impacting your entire body being and it improves your mental functioning.

Why don’t more smokers with mental health issues see the light and quit? Well part of being mentally ill is not giving a shit about yourself anymore. If you have major depression, low self esteem or you hate yourself what do you care if you are toxic? You don’t care if you live or die.

Everyone is out to get you. Life is all about suffering and being morbid. The world is going to hell in a hand basket and no one understands you so why not smoke since it’s one small pleasure in an otherwise meaningless existence.

That’s part of why it’s called a ‘mental’ illness. You have beliefs and make rationalizations and decisions that you would not make or have if you were healthy and you both respected and loved yourself. Your point of view is self centered and skewed.

You don’t see the Big Picture with regards to the mind-body connection or you just don’t care. You don’t see how you are actually hurting yourself and making your experience of being alive less pleasurable by making your body sick and poisoning your internal organs.

Let’s talk about the smoking in institutions for a moment.  Let’s pretend for a moment that for some reason out of the blue I was majorly depressed and forced into a hospitalization. Now I am on the ward with all the chain smokers.

I would greatly appreciate it if smoking were totally banned inside the hospital. I don’t care if you are a schizophrenic or a bipolar and smoking is your coping method. You do not have the constitutional or God given right to spread your addictive, cancerous poison cloud and force me to breath it.

I know now what I didn’t know in my youth and that’s that smoking makes your mental health worse and not better. If you don’t care about yourself, fine, that’s part of the illness. But I do care about myself and I won’t stand for it. I would slap that cigarette out of your mouth if you lit up next to me in a closed, indoor environment and I wouldn’t care who you were on the outside.

Not all people with mental health issues are smokers. My younger brother has depression and is not a smoker. One of my sisters has a bipolar Dx and is not a smoker. My abusive stepfather was never a smoker.

Nevertheless I will always associate heavy smoking with mental illness. Everytime I see someone light up in public around other people and I can see them taking deep drags I can’t get the image of the lab monkey flipping a switch for hours to get another dose of cocaine in a research on addictions out of my mind.

Now for all that I said about how awful and detrimental smoking is, there is one and only one possible, highly unlikely, totally hypothetical circumstance I can think of where I might smoke again.

You know how they chemically castrate serial sex offenders as a judicial punishment? They punish you for having mental illness too. They call it a chemical lobotomy.

If you are one of those poor souls who is under an assisted outpatient treatment order then you are being medicated against your will. Antipsychotics are dangerous brain, gland and nervous system damaging drugs that are standard treatments now for people with bipolar and schizophrenia

One thing I extracted from the Brain Blogger article is that smoking can severely diminish the effects of antipsychotics. That is really nifty information to know. If I was under an AOT order and there was a nurse coming to my home to inject me with antipsychotics I would start smoking again.

Not because I hate myself. I would hate the necessity of smoking. I would feel remorse for hurting myself by smoking. But the need to resist and fight the effects of the meds short term would be a more important consideration than the possible long term effects.

As a strategy or a tactic I would smoke all day in the hope I could feel my old self again and have my critical faculties, memory and artistic inspiration back while biding my time for the day when I could get back in court to revisit the order for assisted treatment or the day that I could afford to escape to another state or country. I would quit later once I was free of the med.

Take note, all you victims of Fuller Torrey and TAC that smoking will reduce the brain lock that antipsychotics have on you. So light em up. Just don’t blow smoke at others (or tell your Pdoc).

I had never heard of Truehope until the last couple of years. I learned of it from videos and comments on Youtube. I’ve never tried it either. The window of opportunity when that might have interested me came and went a decade ago. Nevertheless people continue to ask my opinions about it so here you go.

During my early twenties I read some books by Dr. Andrew Weil and became interested in nutrition. My first vitamins I ever tried as an adult were these UltraMultiPak vitamins you find on the counter by the register at conveniance stores and gas stations. Later on I became more discerning and discriminating about supplements and tried all kinds of different formulas.

Truly I felt better when I started taking them. I worked a lot of hours back then doing hard physical labor. I smoked and consumed caffeinated and sugared beverage all day. I did a lot of drugs.

When you live like that you can very well become ‘deficient’ and taking a Flintstones children’s vitamin, a Centrum Silver for seniors or even a prenatal multivitamin can help you bear the load of bad habits, indulgence and heavy toxicity. You have more endurance and sleep better when you take a multivitamin and have a stressful, toxic lifestyle.

I tried all kinds of herbs like ginseng, dong quai, black cohosh, ginko biloba, valerian root, lavender, fish oil, St John’s wort. I’ve tried all sorts of stuff like DHEA, pregnenalone, L-triptophan, phenylanaline and melatonin. I jumped on the supplement wagon with both feet right away. In my opinion, supplements can very useful and helpful.

Now let’s take a look at Truehope.  When I first heard about it somebody came to one of my videos and completely off topic leaves the comment “Try Truehope, it cures bipolar.” Honestly after my experiences in healing my own mental health issues and considering the years of hard work and trial and error, I was immediately and rightfully skeptical. That’s what caused me to take a look at the Truehope/EMpower videos on YT.

Let us now take a moment to examine the underlying back story behind Empower.

The story involves a conversation between two Canadian Mormons, Anthony Stephen and David Hardy. The story goes something like this. Mr Stephen, a property manager was complaining to his fellow church goer Mr Hardy about his children’s behavior. Namely some symptoms of ADD and some manic components of bipolar. Mr Hardy, whose experience as a cattle feed salesman informed him, stated that some of these behaviors sounded similar to a condition that occurs to domestic pig farms, Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome.

Mr Hardy offered up that information that introducing vitamins and minerals into pig food seemed to clear up ETBS. Some theorycrafting between the two of these men soon resulted with the conclusion that by introducing vitamins and minerals to Mr Stephen’s children that the human version of Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome might just clear up and what did he have to lose but to try?

Unfortunately, Mr Hardy failed to mention that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever which indicates that ETBS is caused by mineral or vitamin deficiency. In fact, what production pig farmers have found is that ETBS was remedied by changing the taste of the pig feed, by adding or removing pigs from the population and giving pigs toys to play with.

The consensus among production pig farmers is that boredom seems to be the most likely cause of ETBS and shaking up the pigs routine with new stimulus seems to clear ETBS up promptly. Pigs are smart, curious and exploratory. If I was doing time in a pig pen with nothing to interest me I might get irritable too. It makes sense that ETBS is not really a syndrome per se but a pig social and behavioral problem resulting from confinement that clears up for awhile as soon you divert the pigs with something new.

It is true that shotgunning a mix of vitamins and minerals at pigs who demonstrated ETBS has in some cases, cleared up the EBTS in those pigs. However, correlation does not prove causation and there are no concrete scientific studies which validate the mineral deficiency = EBTS theory.

Synergy Group, the company behind Truehope makes several claims about the science behind and manufacturing of their supplement. Let’s examine some of those claims.

The first thing you should know about Synergy Group’s Empower formula is that it contains nearly forty run-of-the mill vitamins and minerals that you can find in many other supplement formulas. During my research for this the first thing I did was to go to the Truehope website where they list the ingredients for Empower.

Synergy Group is not the only company that lists their supplement ingredients. During my research I checked out Centrum formulas like Centrum Silver and Centrum Active. I checked out GNC formulas like Solotron Platinum and Women’s Hair, Skin and Nail formula. I checked out Flintstone’s multivitamin for kids. I checked out a generic prenatal formula sold at Walgreen’s.

The website would have you believe that “EMPowerplus contains a broad spectrum of vitamins and trace minerals in a balance designed specifically for people with mental illnesses”

Synergy Group is Mr Stephen and Mr Hardy and their paid employees, admins and consultants. Syngery Group’s marketing department would have you believe that Mr Stephen whose background is in property managing and Mr Hardy whose background is in sales, have, between the two of them, figured out the precise metabolic and nutritional differences between otherwise healthy people and people with ADHD, schizophrenia, Tourette’s, Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive and many more mental health problems.

How do these two guys know what the precise zinc or Vitamin A requirements a person with depression needs? When did these experiments take place? Where is this massive testing population that would have been necessary to determine the exact amount of say, Vitamin B2 or calcium that a bipolar needs versus what someone with ADHD needs versus what a healthy person’s levels are?

The wording of that statement ‘in a balance designed specifically for people with mental illnesses’ implies that these two men have all this information figured out. Empower is claimed to be formulated to remedy the deficiencies caused by bipolar, ADHD and even schizophrenia. When we compare Empower to some of the above multivitamins from other brands we don’t really have huge differences but there are some. Here is just a sample for comparison.

Amount of Biotin per formula.

Empower: 3000mcg
Centrum: 3000mcg
GNC: 30mcg
Flintstone’s: 40mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0mcg

Amount of Vitamin A per formula

Empower: 1536 IU
Centrum: 5000 IU
GNC: 15000 IU
Flintstone’s: 3000 IU
Walgreen’s prenatal: 4000 IU

Amount of Folic Acid (vitamin B9) per formula

Empower: 384 mcg
Centrum:  400 mcg
GNC: 400 mcg
Flintstone’s: 400 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 800 mcg

Amount of Calcium per formula

Empower: 352 mg
Centrum: 1000 mg
GNC: 200 mg
Flintstone’s: 100 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 200 mg

Amount of Riboflavin (Vitamin B2) per formula

Empower: 3.6 mg
Centrum: 1.7 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s:  1.7 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 1.7 mg

Amount of Iron per formula

Empower: 3.7 mg
Centrum:  18 mg
GNC: 10 mg
Flintstone’s: 18 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 28 mg

Amount of Niacin per formula

Empower: 24 mg
Centrum: 20 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s: 15 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 20 mg

Amount of Choline per formula

Empower: ??mcg
Centrum: 0 mcg
GNC: 50 mcg
Flintstone’s: 38 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0 mcg

Amount of Inositol per formula

Empower ?? mcg
Centrum: 0 mcg
GNC: 50 mcg
Flintstone’s: 0 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0 mcg

Synergy Group makes the claim that many people who suffer from mental illness may be deficient in vitamins, minerals and amino acids. There seems to be some scientific evidence that backs that up.

Did you know?

There are clinical lab tests, blood and urine analysis which can determine if you truly have a nutritional deficiency. It is not logical to assume you are deficient in anything unless you know that you are not routinely eating balanced nutritious meals.

Before you start stuffing your gullet with overdoses of vitamins and minerals be sure you actually have a deficiency. Otherwise, it is a total waste of money as your body’s natural balancing act will simply flush all the unneeded and excess vitamins and minerals out of your body anyway.

Did you know?

Clinical testing of Empower’s formula has demonstrated that the actual concentration of the supposed specially balanced ingredients can vary as widely as 70% per batch. I suspect that this is not necessarily an EMpower issue and more of an artifact of bulk industrial processing that occurs to other supplements too but still.

Can you imagine if the caffeine in your morning coffee fluctuated as much as 70%? If treated with lithium, can you imagine the lithium fluctuating as much as 70% per dose? If taking morphine for post surgical pain management can you imagine if it fluctuated up to 70% per dose? Can you imagine if the alcohol in good old cheap American beer fluctuated that much per bottle?

Whether we use substances for medical or recreational purpose a 70% variation in potency would be absolutely unacceptable if we are trying to maintain a certain blood level of a chemical to gain it’s effects consistently. Now we are to assume that the efficacy of the carefully selected and balanced Empower formula is just fine with as much as 70% variance?

One supporting claim made by Synergy Group is that the consumer gains more benefit from Empower due to the chelation processing that they put their supplement through which supposedly increases the bioavailability of their formula.

Did you know?

Chelating minerals does in fact make them more bioavailable when the process is done thoroughly.

Did you know?

The chelation process is laborious, time consuming and costly. In bulk industrial processing only a portion of the mixture, anywhere from 50 to 60 percent is properly chelated.

Did you know?

No matter how much chelation a mineral goes through, no matter how bioavailable it is your body can only absorb a certain amount which differs from person to person somewhat. When your body has reached that amount the remainder is passed out through urine and stool within a day or two.

Did you know?

Synergy Group is not the only supplement company that puts their formula through a chelation process. On any given night at the chelation plant, the Empower formula is just one of several lots from different companies being processed. You can find chelated formulas from other suppliers.

Did you know?

The best, most natural bioavailable form of consuming vitamins and minerals takes places in our intestines as our own digestive process naturally chelates the organic compounds in food like broccoli or walnuts or fish or whatever. You don’t actually need chelated formulas, your body can chelate biomolecules just fine.

As I mentioned earlier I am a proponent of nutritional awareness for mental health recovery. I am not trying to encourage or discourage anyone from trying Empower. My advice, if you intend on trying it, would be to first give a few, cheaper, multivitamin formulas a try.

Do an experiment on yourself. Try one multivitamin for four weeks and take notes on how you feel. Try a different multivitamin for another four weeks and take notes on how you feel. You may very well find yourself gaining some mental or emotional benefit from them. Then, if you want to be sure, go ahead and try some Empower for four weeks and see if it makes a difference.

If you feel much better on it than on other supplements you may be on to something. If you notice the benefits are more or less the same as what you were getting from your Other Brand Multivitamin then there is no reason to spend the extra money on Empower.

While the Bipolar Disorder to Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome connection is pretty weak there is some real evidence that vitamin supplementation can help people with mental health issues. The question then becomes, does Syngery Group’s Empower formula really offer you something unique that you can not get elsewhere? The answer is, probably not.

Although their marketing strategy tried to convince you otherwise, we know that there are other, cheaper sources of multivitamin formulas which have gone through chelation processing and have a higher bioavailability of nutrients than ionic or colloidal formulas.

Don’t let the chelation, bioavailability lingo distract you from the facts. No matter how much bioavailable nutrients you consume, there is a limit to how much your body can take before you are overdosing for no real therapeutic reason and you are facing diminishing returns.

So, if Empower is a cure, how long does it take before you are cured? That was one of my first questions. A week? A month? A year? How much of this stuff do you take and for how long until your bipolar or schizophrenia is gone for good?

When I asked one of the youtubers that was pimping Truehope on my videos that question, this was his answer.

“well you take them… just like you eat food, just like you breath, just like you meditate, I thought I already said that, I did. I thought that was a good enough answer.”

Wow. Just…wow. I coaxed this answer out of him after several attempts at asking the question again and again which he continuously evaded as he tried to derail and deflect the conversation in different directions using the time honored distraction of asking me unrelated questions rather than give an honest, simple answer to my question.

Perhaps these random youtube people are just not ideal presenters for this product. Let’s check out the professional customer service representatives with their precise and very carefully worded little scripts and see if they have the answers I was interested in.

I found these tracks and quoted the important stuff.

To be fair, if you listen to the calls you will note that I quoted out of context. I picked the really ‘telling’ statements and put them together because that is how my brain interpreted what I was hearing. The actual statements can be listened to on these tracks or you can backhack the link and get the transcripts from the site itself.

How does EMpower work and how much do you take for how long?

Customer support call for bipolar disorder

“Generally what will happen after you start the EMpower it gets into your body and starts repairing that chemical imbalance a little bit at a time. Generally everyone starts off at 18 (capsules) a day.  That is what we have found through our research that your body needs. Once you have gone three months without symptoms that is when we would begin to find a maintenance dose for you. Generally we see people maintaining at 9-12 per day.” ( About half or slightly less than half of the ‘loading’ dose apparently)

It’s creepy similar to what the psych nurses and my psychiatrist told me in the hospital. I was to start off at the highest doses possible of trilafon and lithium to get me ‘adjusted’ as fast as possible. Reducing dosing would be considered way down the line after I had some number of months on max doses.

The psych nurse who added lithium to the mix a few weeks after the antipsychotic explained the need for it like this.

“You are bipolar. You have a chemical imbalance which causes you to be unable to control your moods from one pole to the other. Lithium will stabilize that chemical imbalance.”

My response was probably a slurred and tired,

“Uh, ok, sure whatever.”

I was told I would never be able to live without medications or I would become ill again. As a teen who was doped out on a neurolpetic I did not have the faculties or critical thinking ability needed to turn back to this psych nurse and say something like,

“Wait, what?”

or

“I beg pardon?”

I did not know what questions to ask.

What happens if you come off EMpower?

Customer support call for depression.

“EMpower corrects the chemical imbalance in the brain by supporting it with vitamins and minerals. If you were ever to come off EMpower your body would no longer have that support. Your original symptoms would return. So, it’s unfortunately, an incurable illness.”

Wait a second. This is also the same story that psychiatrists tell you about your illness and meds. Let’s bring this whole thing to a halt here and start asking some questions.

When the psych nurse told me lithium would stabilize my chemical imbalance, what chemical imbalance are we talking about here? There is no concrete proof that any particular ‘chemical imbalance’ is to blame for bipolar. Was I suffering from a lithium deficiency?

Perhaps she was referring to the thoroughly debunked serotonin and other neurotransmitter ‘deficiency’ theories. Most of the really crappy research done on the serotonin deficiency theories were related to depression. Even if these studies did pan out the ’serotonin deficiency theory’ it certainly does not explain the ‘manic’ aspect of bipolar.

What about the customer reps at Truehope calling centers? Their statements would seem to imply that Syngery Group has a better understanding of these chemical imbalances than Harvard researchers. Right?

Are these Truehope folks even talking about the same chemical imbalances that your psychiatrist told you about? Although they use the term glibly enough the Truehope folks’s definition of a chemical imbalance is a bit different from the definitions of biopsychiatry researchers and pharma companies.

The folks over at Truehope use the ‘Nutrient Theory of mental illness’ That means when these reps are talking about EMpower ‘going in and repairing those imbalances’ they are coming from a point of view that all these mental illness, bipolar, depression, ADHD, anxiety are all caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Some of you may be familiar with Linus Pauling, two time Nobel prize winner and father of orthomolecular medicine. He did some experiments in which people with various mental health issues were given megadoses of vitamins and noticed improved functioning in some of them.

The ’science’ underpinning Truehope can be boiled down to these summations of the information they are presenting on that website.

A. Mental illness is considered to be a chemical imbalance. Since vitamins and minerals are necessary for proper production of neurotransmitters a deficiency in vitamins and minerals may be the cause of your chemical imbalance.

B. Some scientists theorize that some people have a genetic need for more vitamins and minerals than others. Some scientists have show that some genetic mutations require more vitamins and minerals. We at Truehope have connected all the dots here. People with bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, OCD, clinical depression and ADHD are genetic mutants with active deficiencies of vitamins and minerals the specifics and exact amount of which we have figured out and presented as EMpower to fix those deficiencies.

C. The deficiencies of these genetic mutants are causing their brain cells to shrink and die. That has to have some kind of effect.

D. One of our company founders thinks that maybe it’s all about being deficient in a few vitamins and minerals and this causes systemic wide chain reactions which lead to even greater deficiencies or inability to properly uptake some nutrients. Our formula fixes all that stuff no problem because we know exactly what it takes to remedy that.

Oh. Really? Let’s look at an example and see what that means.

Amount of Niacin per formula

Empower: 24 mg
Centrum: 20 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s: 15 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 20 mg

Let me get this straight. I am supposed to believe that Mr. Hardy and Mr. Stephen have figured out that people with anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD and Tourette’s require 24 mg of Niacin? How did they figure that out?

It seems to me that the Centrum and Prenatal formulas are getting awfully close to the levels needed to treat those with genetic deficiencies of niacin. The GNC formula exceeds the amount of niacin needed to successfully treat these bipolars and depressives and their genetic deficiencies.

When we look at other ingredients we find similar levels.

Amount of Folic Acid (vitamin B9) per formula

Empower: 384 mcg
Centrum:  400 mcg
GNC: 400 mcg
Flintstone’s: 400 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 800 mcg

These guys at Truehope have got it all figured out. For regular folks who are just looking to supplement an active lifestyle 400 mcg of B9 are sufficient. If you have bipolar disorder you really only need 384 mcg of B9.

Remember, the folks at Truehope have balanced their formula specifically to address the chemical imbalances found in those people with genetic mutations which lead them to get mental health labels like ADHD and schizophrenia due to their deficiencies.

The dosing is not a one to one correspondence. The amounts listed consist of a single ’serving’ of EMpower. One serving being four capsules. Their maintenance dosing guidelines would have you taking twice that amount to keep your symptoms at bay. This is after a prolonged period where you actually take four times that amount.

Typically your average multivitamin is taken once or twice a day. “One with every meal” are the instructions on the labels of some of them. If you take two GNC or Centrums daily this is more or less half of EMpower’s ‘maintenance dose’ for a good many of the very same vitamins and minerals.

I am really impressed that these two guys, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Stephen were able on their own to figure out the nutritional requirements imposed on those people with the genetic deficiencies which lead to chemical imbalances which are later diagnosed as ADHD, OCD, manic depression and so on.

What about the makers of GNC and Centrum and Flintstones vitamins? Don’t they realize that by simply doubling the daily supplementation regimen they would probably start getting people calling in to report their schizophrenia is clearing up?

Defenders of EMpower would say no. They would argue that that the chelated bioavailability of EMPower means it is superior to anything GNC or Centrum could do. What is stopping GNC and Centrum from getting into the curing of bipolar disorder business by simply chelating their formulas?

Defenders of EMpower might propose that even with chelation GNC or Centrum formulas still can’t do what EMPower does. Their defense will come down to this. “It’s the Colonel’s Secret Recipe that makes EMpower so good!”

Can we create a knock off of EMpower on our own? We could find a supplement with more or less the same ingredient list as EMpower that chelates their formula. Then we just start picking the other supplements off the shelves.

Purchase some ginkgo, phenylalanine, glutamine, inositol and combine that with a double dose of Centrum Complete and you would be getting very, very close to the formula that EMpower has.

Close enough that if you had bipolar or schizophrenia and you created this formula yourself and experimented on yourself at the dosing levels described by the Truehope customer reps then if you are one of these people with a genetic deficiency than there is a very good chance that you may get some noticeable improvements.

I don’t think that Mr Hardy and Mr Stephen have figured out that kids with ADHD or Tourettes or teens with depression or adults with schizophrenia are all equally handled by ingesting mega doses of certain nutrients.

I don’t believe it frankly. I don’t believe they have the scientific papers, the statistics, the hard data that would indicate that taking 96 mg of niacin daily is what it takes to put schizophrenia in remission. Not 196 mg or 3 mg daily. No. 96 mg.

They would have us believe they have figured out the exact amounts, not only of niacin or folic acid but also the other 38 vitamins and minerals and supporting amino acids.  I don’t believe it. You, as a customer and consumer should at least hesitate to believe it.

It would be really nice if they could post their research findings in the interests of transparency and for the good of medicine. I want to know more about their research protocols other than randomly testing some formulas out on their friends and children. I want to see research data.

They are definitely not forthcoming with how they figured out the precise formulas for the nutritional needs of bipolars. What about kids with Tourettes? Come on. It stinks of bullshit that they are really sitting on information we would hope, gleaned from hard won trial and error and proper double blind studies. We are asked to take it on faith and to accept the very convenient family stories told by Mr Hardy and Mr Stephen.

I figured that if this was a real cure then you would be done with their supplement once your symptoms were gone for a good long while. No way. That would not make any money. It is very telling that these folks use the same language, the exact same language that pharmaceutical companies do when they market psychiatric meds.

“Prozac is one medicine in a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, that work to fix these chemical imbalances.”

“Abilify, for the mainenance treatment of Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia”

The folks over at Truehope are telling you that your genetic mutation that makes you perpetually deficient in vitamins and minerals is an incurable illness. Discontinue EMpower and it’s back to relapseville for you.

Is that really a cure then? Not in my book it’s not. It’s a treatment in the same vein as psychiatric drugs. A treatment you are never suppose to stop. It’s a healthier alternative to psychiatric meds, that much is sure.

The Truehope marketing department is top notch. They have co-opted the big pharma jargon like ‘chemical imbalance’ and ‘maintenance dose’. They have co-opted the nutritional supplement buzz words like ‘chelated’, ‘bioavailable’ and ‘deficiency’.

Then they take an average multi vitamin supplement. They pack it with a variety of aminos and other compounds that are all the rage in nutrition and health food circles. Supplements that you would normally buy separately. Then they have the formula chelated and voila, they have a very complete, high quality nutritional supplement.

As a supplement, it seems so complete that even I could be tempted by it. Setting aside the misgivings about how consistent this formula is prepared industrially, taking one or two EMpower capsules a day I would be theoretically getting the same things as the combination I get from several different supplements and formulas. Taken at face value, as a health supplement it’s solid.

One thing that bugs me about Truehope is the cheesy ‘feel good ‘ names they call themselves and their stuff. Another thing that bothers me is their one size fits all approach. It’s their claims to being able to fix such an incredibly wide array of mental problems with one supplement. They don’t seem to offer much advice if the stuff does not work. Much like Big Pharma they tell you to keep taking it anyway claiming that the balancing can take months and to bear with it.

It’s terribly disingenuous of them to use the same language as Big Pharma but you know what? Their marketing people know it works. People sees these ads for Celexa, Abilify, Cymbalta or Seroquel and they are readily convinced they have some unspecific chemical imbalance issue which these drugs are going to ‘maintain’ for them. The bullshit meters of the people buying these drugs did not go off after seeing a TV advertisement for psychiatric meds and they are not going off for Truehope either.

To sell nutritional supplements or psychiatric medications you have to tell potential customers why they need those products. You use scare language and convince them they are missing something they need that you have. People get enchanted by buzz words and jargon. People eat them up, pun intended.

Another thing that bugs me about Truehope is those customer reps your heard and the endless streams of bullshit coming out their mouths. Listen to those phone calls and don’t tell me you are not both amused and appalled at what these reps are saying and the Big Picture that is revealed when they talk about the dosing.

They are not selling just hype hope. They are selling fear too. If you uncritically accept what these reps tell you then you may very well be successfully convinced that you have a genetic mutation that means you are subject to perpetual vitamin and mineral deficiency. What you need to do as a critically thinking consumer is to find out if it is really true that you are have this deficiency.

When you think you have True Hope in the palm of your hand you are setting yourself up for the expectation effect, selective thinking, confirmation bias and the placebo effect. If you went to your GP and got some blood work done and the results came in and you did not have any deficiencies and yet you still suffered from depression, bipolar, schizophrenia or whatever, then what? You are back to square one.

If you got that blood work done before you bought EMpower than you know now, instead of guessing whether or not you really have a deficiency genetic or otherwise. I know what you are thinking. That would take all the magic out of it.

Personal anecdote about the power of real hope.

When I was fifteen I lived in a very scary place. I was placed in a lockdown facility, a special school for teens with major emotional and behavioral issues. I had been Dxd with Bipolar 1 and Schizoaffective months earlier. Secretly, I had just stopped taking my meds.

Without the drugs my mental abilities and perceptions came back online. I found the Patient’s Bill of Rights and I learned that I was now of the age of consent to refuse meds legally. I also found out they could not keep me locked up there anymore if I was not being ‘treated’ anymore. It’s called Habeas Corpus.

When I read that I knew there was possibility that I could get out of there. I was living in the company of disturbed sometimes violent teenagers amidst neurotic and occasionally abuse staff. I was in lockdown with very few rights or privileges. It was the middle of winter. My family had given up on me. I had been abandoned, again, this time to psychiatric gulag.

I had every reason in the world to feel hopeless and suicidally depressed and until I read the Patient’s Bill of Rights I was secretly massively suicidally depressed and unbeknownst to the staff I had made an abortive attempt to hang myself on the ward a week earlier.

When I read the Bill of Rights and learned about Habeas Corpus for the first time in a long time I had true hope. That hope was like divine light from inside. It swept aside my depression and anger. I was cheerful. Magnanimous. Happy. Content even. My mood totally reversed itself and I felt unstoppable. I knew real victory for me against my keepers was at hand. In fact I did win, in court a few months later and I got out of there.

The point is, real true hope can totally change your mental and emotional states around. Totally and completely and so fast it’s like magic. It can shatter months long depression and make you smile.

In my opinion Synergy Group’s decision to call themselves Truehope was pure marketing genius. If you are desperate and suddenly you have hope you may have a spontaneous remission of your suffering based entirely off the feeling of purpose and confidence you now possess.

For some maybe it’s almost subliminal but to me it’s a form of suggestion, to call their product ‘EMpower’ and their shtick ‘Truehope’. What is stopping GNC or Centrum from tweaking their formula and coming up with a competing  cure for that genetic mutation? Wouldn’t they make even more money? Would they call it TRanquil? or INspire? NUbalance? HealingZ?

A lot of folks have experimented on themselves like I did and found some emotional or thought related improvements from supplementation. I had enjoyed some great benefits from mere generic multivitamins when I was not taking care of myself all that well.

When I started taking care of myself and eating and living better the effects of supplements became much less. Unless you really do in fact have a proven and documented medical condition that prevents the natural uptake of vitamins and minerals then your body will naturally uptake and absorb what it needs from a well balanced diet.

There is no need to ‘buy’ into the ‘nutrient deficiency theory’ and just assume you happen to have a genetic defect. That’s what Truehope expects you will do. They expect you to connect the dots and conclude that your mental health issues are the result of a genetic mutation and that their product makes perfect sense to take to treat it.

In that they are just like Big Pharma who does not expect you will go on the internet and dig up research and studies which would show just how weak and unproven their chemical imbalance claims are. You are a customer. You are residual income to them and it makes good financial sense to get everyone into ‘maintaining’ themselves with whatever pills or supplements are the latest rage.

Find out first if you really have a genetic mutation that means you require four to twenty times the USDA recommended levels of vitamins and minerals. Just ask your GP for a blood lab. You will know in a few days or weeks. The Truehope reps won’t tell you to do that. You are not supposed to think critically about their claims.

Anything in life that is really worth having may be hard to attain. Lasting and stable mental health is one of those things that is worth having. If you have been seriously mentally ill for a long time it’s probably not going to be easy to attain.

I have been depression free for well over a decade. I have not had clinical or disabling anger, anxiety or manic issues in well over a decade. I cured myself of bipolar disorder, schizoaffective and ptsd.  Supplementation was about 2-5 %  of my overall personal mental health pyramid. It had an effect but it did not cure me of anything.

What cured me was meditation. Real meditation done over a long enough period of time changes your brain. The changes are so thorough and complete that I do not need to meditate every single day for hours on end like I did during my 20s when I was actively trying to attain emotional stability and mental quiet.

I have gone through long stretches where I did not take my supplements.  In the wake of 9-11 the company I worked for eventually shut down permanently. There was long period of time where I could not afford to supplement like I had been. I did not relapse because I stopped taking multivitamins.

I can go without meditation or supplements for long periods and not relapse because I was really and truly cured. I was changed. My brain changed. In psychiatric lingo my ‘chemicals’ became balanced again. When you are no longer dependent on pig pills or psych meds to remain stable you have a real cure. Otherwise you are just in treatment and not really recovered at all. If that treatment is supposed to be permanent then to claim you are healed, recovered or cured is the highest form of self deceit and dishonesty.

Personally, I am a closet scientist. I don’t have the math ability to be a really good lab worker but I must test and discover things for myself. I love to experiment and test my ideas. I always have.

I tell people that if they think they really are cured or recovered then they should find out if it’s really true. That means taking personal responsibility for your mental states and going through a period of time where you discontinue psych meds or supplements to find out for sure if you really are recovered underneath.

No psych med or herbal remedy or multivitamin or amino acid can heal your spirit. If you are spiritually lost and adrift no supplement is going to fix you. If you hate and loathe yourself no pill or capsule is going to fix that.

There is no supplement that can give you real self love and self respect. Those are two ingredients that I find are ‘deficient’ in a lot of people who suffer from mental illness and have labels like bipolar or borderline.

Self love, self respect and inner peace are a kind of magic too. If you love yourself truly you won’t self injure or want to terminate your own life. If you love life then you won’t suffer like those folks who think life is against them and they hate the world. If you have inner peace you have a shield against thought disorders, mania, compulsions and obsessive thinking.

You can achieve lasting mental health recovery by tending to the needs of your spirit and by embracing a lifestyle of simplicity, moderation and spirituality. You can help yourself by learning to relax, manage stress and let go of things you can’t control.

Some issues just go away with time. Maturity heals some kinds of problems. Getting older, growing up and the process of aging can find that you have picked up all sorts of cerebral ways to cope with impulses. Learning about your sensitivities and limits can allow you to avoid maxing out your stress levels. You learn to take it easy and to take care of yourself better and your bad days of major symptoms come less and less often as a result.

If you have a real genetic condition that prevents you from uptaking bioavailable minerals and vitamins you can get blood work to establish that fact and working with your doctor you can come up with a supplementation regimen that fits *you* and your needs and not just some one size fits all capsule that is apparently good enough for everyone and anyone who has issues.

Some EMpower defenders may find this post and say to me,

“EMpower has helped me so get off your crusade bitch you don’t know what you are talking about. This stuff saves lives. Who are you to talk smack about my beloved EMpower? Oh and Linus Pauling is God and you don’t have a Phd so stfu.”

I actually have had these kinds of comments before from people who took great personal offense that I dared call it Pig Pills or Truehype.  You know what boys and girls? I got the same kinds of hypervigilant and aggressive comments not to mention verbal abuse or ad homs from people defending psychiatric meds when I ripped into them too.

It didn’t stop me from warning folks, offering alternative solutions and telling people to think critically about psychiatry and psych meds. I don’t care if EMpower saved your dog. People wanted my opinion and based on what I’ve read about it, here it is. If you don’t  like what I have to say about your miracle vitamin get over it and move on.

There is something a little sketchy about the folks coming out with autobiographies on how Truehope saved their life. They are not just sharing their experiences and moving on. If you go to their sites they are selling Truehope products usually in what I assume can only be a mutual interests back scratching and profiteering franchise of some kind. They are getting paid to pimp Truehope.

I am not anti recovery and I don’t have an anti Truehope agenda. Truehope has got sleaze all over it though. From the weasel word salad that is their FAQ’s and research pages to their sweepingly huge claims in terms of how many mental issues they claim they cure. In the past miracle cures claiming to be effective in curing ‘everything’ have always panned out to be false, misleading or untrue. Always.

If you have been saved by EMpower, good for you. I hope it lasts. I hope you are not deceiving yourself and unnecessarily assuming you have a genetic mutation that requires you to take much greater amounts of vitamins and minerals than other people. If you really do have such a deficiency by all means keep on taking your capsules.

If you won’t get tested to see if that is really the case I hope you will one day have the self honesty and courage to find out if you are really cured of anything by trying a discontinuation period to see if you have really changed.

There will be those that defend EMPower and their final rebuttal will invariably be.

“If it helps people is that wrong? What do you have against that? If it works, what’s your problem? How can it be bad if people are benefiting from it? Who cares what it’s made of or how it’s made? Who cares who made it and why? If it works who are you to judge?

I don’t have a problem with that at all. Some of us just like to look under the proverbial hood and see what’s underneath. We wonder how the tricks are done and try to figure them out out of curiosity and a need to know how things work.

Look in the mirror one of these days and look at yourself in the eye and ask yourself if you are not riding hype, expectancy and the placebo effect. If you don’t want to find out or you don’t care how the magic works as long it works then fine. There are a lot of people like you that think that way about things in life like that.

This has been a really long post. I said it at the beginning and I will say it again. I have not personally tried EMpower so take my opinions with that in mind. I am not encouraging or discouraging anyone from trying EMpower. As I said earlier, from what I can tell, as supplements go it is a very complete one. If it was called TaiChiDragonFuel or something like that I would probably take it myself as my one-a-day multi.

I changed my mind about being done on this blog. There is still some stuff to write about.

Recently a visitor, Andy, asked me a question about smoking and meditation.

My answer to his question is the same answer I would give if someone asked me if they could smoke pot, drink coffee, do hallucinogens or take pysch meds while meditating and what effects would it have on meditation progress. I have been asked those questions before many times since I started vlogging and blogging about it.

I did make a short video about Meditation, spirituality and drug effects. but not everyone gets to my videos and upon consideration I could expound a bit more about the effects because I was one of those folks who tried meditating in my early twenties when I hooked on or experimented with everything from pot and mushrooms and painkillers to caffeine, speed, anxiety and anger.

None of this is theory but my own personal experiences using substances and chemicals and observing their effects on my internal states.

The question goes something like this.

Can I meditate or begin meditating under the influence of substances X, Y and Z?

The short answer is simply this. It won’t matter at the beginning, it will be a problem later on.

Short winded is something I am rarely accused of and I readily admit to using ten words when two would do. Here is the long answer and it contains meditation spoilers. :)

It won’t matter so much at the beginning, we’ve established that. This is why it will eventually matter quite a bit.

The primary goal of meditation is to create stillness. When you have stillness going on your mind is comfortable at total rest. In that space there is no rumination on things. Especially troubling things like obsessive thinking, dwelling on the past, destructive self critique and all the little voices that tear us down inside in one fashion or another.

Along the way to building stillness you are going to want to resolve in some way all the things that prevent you being still in the first place. To do that you can cultivate awareness of your internal world in two ways. Concentration practice and sensitivity practice.

As you work on one, you will gain greater facility with the other. The longer you concentrate on being aware the more sensitive you will become. The more sensitivity you can develop the greater the accuracy of your concentration will be.

Between the two you will really develop your intuition. Your intuition will inform you as to things inside you that are not quite right. Your intuition sort of processes all the subtle sensations and runs them through the memory chip for correlations and experiential knowledge. In a burst of gut knowledge you will know with fairly good accuracy what is bugging you.

The more practice you give yourself letting intuition guide you the better. Intuition is another faculty and as it’s reliability factor goes up it becomes a resource you can tap into voluntarily. You can just ask yourself what it wrong with you and get an instant and honest answer that might have taken long moments of cogitating and internal self debate to arrive at.

Whether you are meditating for enlightenment, trying to find inner stillness or just using meditation to relax those beginning steps are pretty much the same and the beginning never really ends and is much the same at more advanced levels as it was at the beginning.

You take time to align yourself and sit comfortably. You are mindful of your posture and skull and hips. You engage with your breathing and take a moment to let your mind just spin while you begin to cultivate the intention of your desire to sit still and let everything go.

I did that when I practiced meditation before karate class in my early teens. I do that before I start tai chi while standing. I still do this to this day twenty later when I sit and meditate. The point is the basics are the same no matter what and it’s a work in progress you can keep making refinements to.

When you are first beginning your ability to listen and interpret what is keeping you from being still inside will be fairly general. You will sense blackness or fog inside. You feel different flavors of pain and discomfort. You may space out and drift the minute you try to listen or concentrate.

You will be able to differentiate some things. Some will be really obvious like, gee, I am really angry or really sad right now. You may experience all kinds of mundane stuff like hunger pangs, internal gas moving around, an itch somewhere. Each one of those sensations from the emotional to the physical will be throwing stuff up and the combined noise of your internal world serve as one big mess of stuff inside agitating you all of which is preventing or limiting your stillness.

In terms of substances, everything you put inside yourself can have essentially three basic influences on you. It can add to sum of the noise inside you, it can diminish the noise inside you and it can have more or less no effect at all either way.

In the beginning you are cultivating that concentration and sensitivity. You are working with your breathing and being mindful and you are growing your meditation legs. The processes inherent in successful meditation take time to develop.

The next important factor is how much time you personally devote to cultivating those meditation legs. On that I can say it’s really like any other skill. Whether you are learning a musical instrument or playing tennis or meditating you get out of it what you put into it. If you become freakishly obsessive about meditation you can go thousand miles in one day.

If you are doing it hours a day, six or seven days a week, which is the best way to really change your brain wiring in a continual curve, you will be going thousands of miles a week and you will grow your concentration batteries and sensitivity network (and consequently your intuition as well) considerably faster than a person who meditates one hour a day every other other day.

What ends up happening is you begin to notice exactly how sensation or feelings effect the quality of your internal stillness. You perform an investigation into precisely the nature of your internal stuff that is very much like a science experiment. You begin to notice all that black churning stuff and random sensations isn’t all that random and the black stuff contains things that have definitive qualities we can sense accurately.

Body tension is one of the simplest things that plague us all from achieving stillness. We will find different qualities to that tension as well. You can find yourself holding yourself in a tense way internally. In time you also perceive that hologram-like effect in which the way you hold yourself physically also effects your thoughts and emotions.

Now you are working on three different tensions. Tense muscles and posture, tense emotions, tense thoughts and tense awareness. You resolve all that stuff or bring some measure of relaxation to each of those layers of being and gradually (or suddenly) your internal world is much much quieter.

For awhile you enjoy that quiet. You’ve made real progress. You can stop there. You can maintain a certain meditation hygiene and relax your mind, body and heart and gain great benefit from that.

If you don’t stop there, if you keep on pushing the envelope, you keep growing those meditation legs and make a conscious, deliberate attempt to increase both your concentration and your sensitivity then some thing else is going to happen.

You just grow an affinity for being still and a generalized discomfort with things that detract from that stillness. You will like being still basically and you won’t like the feeling of not being still. Your awareness will begin to nag you about your internal stuff that remains.

Without consciously trying you will be offered up internally, reasons for the sensations and feelings that are still going on inside you. The internal quiet you achieved seems not so quiet anymore. Your sensitivity has grown during the interim and what you sense now is that a new level of stillness could be attained, a deeper level, by resolving the latest batch of unwanted internal sensations.

You are emboldened by your past success so you know you can perceive and remedy the things that are churning you up inside so long as you have the motivation and you are willing to continue to trust your intuition which has also been growing in the interim.

Now we begin to pay ever more attention and mindfulness of our internal world. If we have a weekend in solitude we can spend every waking moment of the day being mindful without the influence of others nearby. We can listen all day acutely to our insides and monitor our internal stillness status. We pay particular attention to when we begin to move away from calm and still towards agitation and our intuition will pop out the answer when you ask,

“What is wrong? Why am I agitated? What is bugging me? How did I just lose my calm and grace?”

The answer will almost always be, something you did or exposed yourself to and put inside you or cultivated that destabilized you from a baseline of calm.

Maybe it was a song on the radio or a movie on cable that you saw. You got into the sensory experience of the movie or the song and by the end you notice you are not calm anymore.

Maybe you got off the phone with a relative or a friend and you noticed you were fine before the phone call, and not fine after it.

Maybe it’s dinner. Maybe you over indulged on spicy foods and you’ve got heartburn or indigestion and sensations are churning you inside somewhere, somehow in some way.

Maybe you slipped on ice or a wet floor and fell hard on butt or on your side or banged your head. You were calm before the fall, after the fall you have all these sensations of injury and insult reporting in. Maybe you are shaking. Making you are self recriminating for falling or getting a good angry going because someone should have cleaned up the water.

Then you sit and meditate you notice all these reactions going off inside you. Spicy food effects your emotions and thoughts. You pay careful attention to what you were thinking and feeling before, during and after consuming one substance or another be it food, music, drugs, vitamins, sex, TV, or a book.

Chocolate for example. A psychoactive substance if there ever was one. You feel and think differently after you eat a good sample of quality chocolate. It can have both a soporific and an innervating effect on me and makes me aware of my body as a sensual thing. ( read that as horny)

Gradually you grow this catalog of stuff that you know knocks you off your meditation pillow. When you really wed your perceptions to your intuition not only will you know what destabilized you but as I hinted earlier, you will also want not to be destabilized. You wonder what you can do to avoid it.

When get to that point you begin to fast. When I mean fast, I don’t just mean abstaining from food. I mean abstaining from everything that represents a possible threat to your internal stillness.

You fast from TV and the internet. Knowing full well they are distractions from being at one with your internal world and being mentally and emotionally still.

You fast from phone calls with relatives and hanging out with that rageholic friend who has so many triggers it’s like walking on eggshells to be around them. You don’t allow someone else’s emotional states to disrupt yours so fast from people too.

One day you will be sitting in your favorite chair and preparing to meditate and you are going to notice that you woke up, calm, centered and still. That’s how you went to bed. If you do that often enough this is what is going to happen.

You will wake up, get up, sit in your chair and take your morning sip of coffee (or tea) and the first puff off your morning cigarette (or cannabis joint) and boom. There it is. Your internal world goes from still and calm to disturbed.

It feels internally like someone threw a rock into your pond of quietude making a big splash and ripples which distort the mirror-like quality of the still water you had about a 30 seconds before the caffeine and nicotine reached your brain.

Then you are going to nod to yourself and say “Fuck”. You will too, because you will know, intuitively and intellectually what destabilized your stillness and you will say “Fuck” out loud because you are going to know immediately what to do about not experiencing that destabilizing again.

Then you will have a little war inside your self that goes something like this.

“No”

“Yes”

“No way”

“You have to”

“No, I don’t”

“Strictly speaking, no one can twist your arm other than yourself. How bad do you want stillness?”

“Fuck”

“I know, you don’t have to do it today though, if you don’t want”

“And how many days that I don’t do it are you going to remind me that I am only impeding my progress by procrastinating?”

“Every damn day that you do it, how’s that?”

“You can shut up now.”

“We will talk again tomorrow morning.”

You will screw around a little longer. You will stop adding sugar or cut yourself down from two cups to one cup. You will switch to the Lights brand of your favorite smoke.

Then you will take only a few sips of coffee and a couple of puffs before putting it out.

Then you will finally get sick of it because while you were putting off the inevitable your evil sensitivity was paying more acute attention to the feelings of the morning ritual of chemicals and you know for a fact that so much as one sip of coffee or one puff can introduce a distorting element inside you.

On that day you will, out of disgust with yourself, finally quit. You will hate every second of it while knowing it has to be done. You are making changes to your habits and behaviors and rituals and that sucks. It’s like losing a good friend.

Then you dissolve that sense of loss. You become a person who does not do those things. Then you find that your evening stillness carries through in the morning. You meditate in the morning and that carries you into the evening.

Eventually, a long ways down the road, you get to a point where that stability is so ingrained that you find you don’t have to meditate as much to keep it going. You can miss an evening or a morning meditation sit and you will be ok.

You will also find yourself, not wanting to miss meditation sessions anymore either. The net effect in the end is that you control for the effects of everything you willingly subject yourself to. When you control enough of those factors you will have much greater stillness and internal perception.

That means in time you must have a biochemistry that is free of substances which agitate, sedate, fog up or inhibit you in any way. Until you free yourself of all the toxic stuff you normally subject yourself to you will be a slave to felt sensation of the distortions of your consciousness. The real You, the >>I<< underneath it all, the source of all intention, the mindstream, the nature of your spirit will all be obscured.

Remember it’s not just foods and drugs. Your sensory experiences create chemical effects. If you watch something offensive, or get yourself riled up reading politics on the internet or you have a codependent relationship with someone who is abusive your resulting thoughts and emotions churn you up inside making stillness difficult if not impossible.

That is what I mean by fasting from everything. Only you know what sets you off and if you studiously avoid those things while trying to develop internal stillness you will progress well.

Otherwise, its like putting one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake especially when meditating and most especially when meditating under the influence of mind altering drugs and chemicals.

Your thoughts are feelings are not your own. They are drug induced. Alternately, your lack of certain thoughts and feelings that are your own can also be drug induced. In the end, if you are serious about hardcore meditation progress all avoidable psycho active, agitating or inhibiting substances must go. You must dissolve your attachment and need for them and if you do you will only benefit.

The ultimate long term benefit and some good news for after.

The ultimate long term payoff for consciously fasting from sensory disruptions is the discovery of your spirit and the source of your mind itself. A great stillness will grow gradually inside you. Within all that emptiness you find both form and formlessness. Something that generates will and intent and awareness.

From there you can do a spiritual investigation, using your awareness of your inner world as the medium, of the nature of the >>I<< itself. If you are very lucky you will discover the mindstream. That takes an extraordinary amount of stillness and relaxed concentration.

The good news is, after a long time of building this core of internal stillness it won’t be dislodged easily. There is scientific evidence that is not just a mental state but a physical development that is real.

If you wanted, if it was practical, you might be able to spend your life in perpetual retreat. Whether you live in ashram or a a hut by yourself deep in the woods you can shield yourself from the bulk of the stresses and distractions of life itself.

The ultimate question becomes, do you really want to? Do you really want to have a life? Do you want to partake of the same things everyone else does? Will it destabilize you?

If the answer is yes, then you are going to be open to hanging out with people, perhaps strangers with all their mysterious inner content. You will read the internets again and watch TV. You will listen to music again. If you really wanted, you could drink a cup of tea or have a beer or smoke a cigar with your friends on New Year’s Eve or move from the country to the city.

You will have a base of inner calm and that calm will persist through things like, being stuck in city traffic. Standing in line at a busy mall. Even going to a bar and having a few drinks and smokes with your coworkers.

Each of those things will add some kind of sensation or agitation or sedation or whatever. You can get irate at the news and it’s ok as long as you don’t make it a habit. If you go back to smoking a pack a day, twenty ounces of coffee, doing different drugs, listening to loud music all the time and gnashing your teeth at the news all day, you will chip away, a bit at a time, all that stillness you won for yourself.

But at this point, hopefully you have a self-harm status indicator in your mind at all times that tells you when you are approaching toxic levels of anything. At that point, you take a break and detox and go back and meditate. You be present and mindful and use the dissolving to smooth the ripples out in your inner pond of stability and bring yourself back to balance.

That way you can still partake of life and keep your calm. You can eat spicy foods and watch an emotional drama and eat some chocolate and wash it down with some alcoholic beverage and you are going to be ok the next day. You are not going to be manic or depressed or agitated so long as the ratio of stillness to stimulus is perpetually slanted in the direction of stillness.

If you can’t moderate yourself to a have a normal amount of stimulation in your life, you need to keep working on stillness and you need to dissolve your attachment to your need to be stimulated. Once you have that core sense of Self and a stable internal world you should try to interact with people and things and enjoy life.

Enjoy that bottle of champagne or that cigar or that joint but be mindful at all times how it effects your stillness meter and your stimulation meter. Keep the former always higher than the latter and you have a formula for being able to enjoy the fullness of life without the ascetic deprivations that were necessary in the intermediate and advanced stages in order to find yourself.

With diligence and continued practice you won’t lose your sense of self amidst a thousand distractions and you have a tool to wash off all the crap that starts to accumulate on your inner clarity. That’s what you do if you want to have a life like everyone else and don’t want to live in a walled fort, unplugged in the middle of nowhere. That’s a path of moderation and balance and it’s one path of the Tao.

Hello folks,

As some of you know October was lost productivity month for me.  I did not get too much done on my book. However I am pleased to announce that I have over 60,000 words committed to print at this point. For the last three weeks I have worked on the manuscript every single day without fail. I am cleaning up two segments of it now and when that is done I will be sending it out to few people that have offered to review it.

My spouse, who is the math brained person in the relationship, has assured me that at approximately 400 words per page of a typical book that I have over 150 pages.  That means I am about half done.  It was also the more tedious portion to do.

I have an apology to make.

Writing, like any skill, is something you get better at the more you do it. Writing intensely in September, taking October off and writing all through November has given me a better eye for what looks good. I am very sorry for the complete suckage that is most of my stuff for the last year. I am sorry for all the suffering I have caused with my lackluster writing skills.

On the news front Mr. Dawdy at Furious Seasons has another strongly worded article roundly castigating the atypical class of neuroleptics. I am in complete agreement with him. I have said it before and I will say it again, drugging children and elderly is neglect and abuse. Antipsychotics/Neurolpetics have been proven to cause brain damage

My experience being forced to take Trilafon/Perphenazine was sheer misery. I have hinted about it here and there and certainly ranted about the evils of antipsychotics time and again. I finally wrote a detailed account of what happened and my experience on trilafon in my manuscript. It was the most difficult part to do so far.

Gianna at Beyond Meds sent me a link to an article about the overmedication of foster children. This was something I witnessed as well during my time in the system. Here is a post I made  awhile back covering some of that.

In other updates I have to take down some of my stuff here. When I started writing about my past it was a first pass at detailing events and details. As I have thought about them and made an effort to remember certain things more and more I find that there will be some variance to what gets put in the book and what I put here.  In order to avoid confusion some stuff will come down.

The new WordPress 2.7 is simply fantastic. The wordpress interface gives you some very useful statistics. For example it tells me what key words people are using when they find this site.

I am pleased to see that nearly every day some critically thinking heretic is asking google the question “Is Bipolar Real” or is “Bipolar bullshit?”

I don’t know what to think about the number of hits I get about the Baker Act. It might have something to do with the fact that I made a video called ‘Beating the Baker Act“  about Baker Act Abuse or “How to Beat the Baker Act.”

Arrgh!

Every single day someone in Florida is being sent to a Baker Act receiving facility against their will as a form of control. My video will teach you what you should expect and how to defeat the system. I give it to you free as a public service.  I don’t live in Florida. I do have some experience getting myself out of an institution legally and by the book.

People are also looking for information on how to Baker Act someone when they find this blog. All I have to say to them is that the Baker Act is only in Florida and that it is wrong.

^^-not my actual plate number

I am pleased to see people searching for alternative methods for managing their mental health problems like bipolar and schizophrenia. Over the last year or so I was asked by many people to summarize the process of real recovery from Bipolar. That is a very complex topic that I could lecture about for hours.  I have summarized the bulk of the important things with a video and post about 12 steps to bipolar recovery.

One of my subscribers recently sent me a link to an article demonstrating that meditation was superior to drugs for treating depression. As many of you know it was meditation that set me free from my mental health problems. When I was very young I was fascinated by the idea of developing mental power through discipline. I went on to share a significant portion of my experience using meditation in a post not too long ago.

I was going to comment on the recent story about suicide on webcam but I don’t really have time. I can say there is a good chance that the kid who did it may have known that broadcasting your suicide  had been done before.

The holidays are a great time to get manic and or kill yourself.  The end of a new year and the beginning of another is a time to spend in reflection of how awful your life is and how hopeless and meaningless your existence is. I wonder how many people will off themselves between now and 2009.

If you feel like killing yourself, please kill only yourself and don’t take other people with you.  It infuriates me when people do that. Take other people with them that is. I don’t believe that every life is worth saving or that suicide is necessarily a bad thing for some people.  I talked about why I feel that way in a video about suicide prevention.

Thanks to Marian for linking the playlist for the documentary ‘The doctor who hears voices”. It was a fabulous series of videos and I fully support the more humane approach towards dealing with mental illness that Rufus May advocates. Throw away your psychiatric drugs, they will never heal you of your problems.

Here is a sample of stuff from my mailbox.

More teens telling me that the drug cocktails their parents force on them are not working and only making them sick.

More foster kids telling me about the abuse that they suffered at the hands of their foster parents because their inept social workers put them in places where they would be retraumatized. One girl told me that her foster mother constantly threatened to put her back in the institutions. An experience I am all too familiar with.

More people, especially veterans of the middle east conflicts with ptsd are being Baker Acted in Florida.

In the last few months more people of all ages have written to tell me that my writings and videos have helped them. I can not tell you how humbled I am by that. I am happy if sharing my experiences had helped. I never expected this kind of response.

I don’t have all the answers to everything. I am not a guru or a doctor or a lawyer. I never intended on doing advocacy or activism. It sort of happened with a life of it’s own. Finally I want to sincerely thank everyone that has given me feedback and encouraged me to keep going.

Looking for Manic Depression coping strategies? Want to know a drug and therapy free method for managing your Bipolar Manic episodes? Do you want to know how to cure yourself of the symptoms of and prevent episodes of bipolar disorder mania? Then this video is for you.

I have tried six times to make this video and get it right. Finally, months after my first attempts, I present to you, a one hour and four minute lecture on how to permanently rid yourself of the Mania portion of Manic Depression. I hate calling it Bipolar. However, this video will teach you how to deal with the *bi-polarity mood swings* heading North. This was how I finally learned to manage and then beat my manic thoughts and delusions while keeping my creativity intact.

The video is basically two parts. In the first 30 minutes I talk about classic symptoms from the DSM. I talked a bit about how I experienced some of them and how I was able to determine what they were. I make no apologies for my take on hypomania. I have been *hypomanic* and have gone on *bipolar powered shopping and sex sprees* and you know what? I don’t think that was evidence of an incurable genetic brain disease. No way Jose. I don’t buy it. I do not believe in hypomania whatsoever.

I do believe that most of the other symptoms are signifying a certain kind of cognitive pattern that goes on largely unnoticed by the person experiencing it until it is pointed out to them by family, friends, therapists and the like. You don’t have to agree with me. You don’t have to like my opinions.

However if you are like me you are looking for alternative mental health treatment for your thought problems I suggest you tune out what you don’t like and keep watching, knowing the good stuff is coming.

If you like your meds and you think I am full of it than pass on this video and nothing will come of it. Frankly I found myself dying a little bit each day on psychiatric medications. It was intolerable.

Unfortunately as an adult unless I was heavily sedated under the effects of marijuana daily I lived in an unquiet mind that seethed with an endless, sourceless seeming, living rage. A mind that raced along like a drunken driver in the wrong lane on the highway. A mind that slammed me with violent imagery and self destructive impulses sometimes from morning until bed time.

I had no choice but to find a means to live with myself and control my thoughts in order to have a meaningful useful life and remain out of some kind of institutionalized living. It was that or drug addiction for life or suicide.

I used meds alright, just not doctor recommended pharma approved meds. In time I gradually learned self psychotherapy and a kind of DBT or CBT with mindfulness and journaling sans the actual journal. Gradually I grew a mental circuit of stillness. Meditation helped develop my prefrontal cortex. That is the area of the brain responsible for emotional and cognitive processing.

Now Kimberly of Bipolarsurvivorback has a video called Bipolar Medications: The Truth.

At around 4:45 and on she launches into every pseudoscientific cliche and fallacy in the book. It’s genetic. It’s a chemical imbalance. It’s like diabetes. But it gets downright intellectually dishonest for her to make the following claim.

In the description box on the right she states this at the bottom “Bipolar disorder, like schizophrenia, requires medications for the amelioration of symptoms, and there are no alternative options.”

This is one such alternative. The techniques that I teach you in this video are not entirely unique to me. I learned some of them from a meditation master and some of his better pupils. However I have been told before and reminded (recently) that these techniques are occasionally to be found in a rare and dying breed of therapists scattered around the world. Psychology degree wielding practicing humanistic psychotherapists occasionally impart this information to their clients. Rarer still is the outlaw psychiatrist heretic that will also teach this information.

Some feedback I have already received indicates that some people vehemently disagree with some of my opinions on bipolar at the beginning. Look, if you storm off in a huff and unsubscribe, obviously I have hit a nerve. However, for those of you who are absolutely serious about beating bipolar mania, I enjoin you to reserve judgment until you get to the second part of the video.

The second part of the video is the most important information I have ever released on my youtube channel about the mind and how it works. This is real psychology folks. This means something to me to share this hard won knowledge with you. This is my version of The Secret and my Theory of Everything (Bipolar).

Information is power and the truth will set you free. The second part of this video contains both. Understanding and practicing this information may empower you and change your life and your relationship to mental illness forever.

We have all heard of the chemical imbalance theory. This so-called theory has been around for years. I was told I had a chemical imbalance at age 14 inpatient in 1989. People will be told this if they are diagnosed today.

I questioned this theory when I was a teen through sheer disbelief. Later I wondered if it might be true. When I realized years had passed since I had had depression, anxiety, mania, voices and delusions despite the prognosis that said I would suffer all my life I knew there was something wrong with that chemical imbalance theory.

At the age of 32 my skepticism and indignation overcame my fears and I asked my GP if I could take the chemical imbalance tests. I wanted to see on paper if I still had a chemical imbalance. Asking her to order the bloodwork and testing for depression and bipolar entailed telling her my long secret psychiatric history. I had no fear of the results. I knew I was cured of Bipolar. I just wanted proof. I wanted to be undiagnosed.

My wonderful doctor returned my call and she informed me there were no lab tests for depression or bipolar. I was flabbergasted and righteously upset. How the hell did the pdocs and my treatment team determine I had had imbalanced chemicals all those years ago?

Answer, they did not know. They flat out lied to me. There was no test to take which proved any balance of any chemicals. I first found out about these lies from the fantastic youtube channel Psychetruth. These two videos, Chemical Imbalance and The Truth about antidepressants and chemical imbalances are excellent primers.

This fact was already well known by psychiatrists. Loren Mosher in his famous resignation letter to the American Psychiatric Association accused his fellow psychiatrists of willingly propagating the chemical imbalance lies despite the fact that it was utterly unproven.

Today I breezed by my friend Gianna’s blog and discovered she had posted an article originally from Healthy Skeptic debunking the chemical imbalance myth.

Healthy Skeptic is run by a guy named Chris Kresser and he has indeed done his homework. This excellent article is a must read for anyone that has ever suffered from depression or depressive illnesses.

Thanks Chris for this information and for your hard work in collating and exposing the realfact versus the pharmaganda.

Two days ago I released a video in response to a question from a viewer regarding the Baker Act.

Anonymous Viewer

Hey Jane

“So I recently was discharged from a baker act that was put on me and had to stay in a hospital for over a week. I had to talk to the doctors about a treatment plan for when I get out. I have an appointment with a therapist coming up and I was wondering am I required by any law to see this therapist AND/OR take my medication that they prescribed me. Can I be baker acted again if I do not see this therapist? I was too scared to ask these questions to the doctors as it would probably raise concern to them and from my guess they would prolong my baker act in the hospital. Thank you.”

My video reply to him.

Between the age of 14 and 16 most teens in the U.S gain the legal right of consent. This includes the right of refusal of consent. An outpatient treatment plan is just that. A treatment plan. It is not a binding legal agreement. Outpatient treatment plan is mental health services paperwork. It is bureaucracy of the inpatient administration. The primary purpose of an outpatient treatment plan is to cover their asses.

Unless you have been court ordered you never have to take meds or attend therapy sessions outpatient that have been prescribed or made for you regardless of who did it or why.

Yesterday I released a video talking about and demonstrating some internal martial arts and a variety of different chi gung moves taken from different sets. In my writing and on my videos I have talked about how tai chi and chi gung helped me rebuild not only my physical health but my mental health as well. This was the work I did to heal.

During my healing journey I studied with a variety of teachers and practiced a variety of methods. When I first started this blog I posted about my martial arts experience and the connection between my post traumatic stress induced obsessions. You can read my martial arts *resume* here.

For the rest of this post I will use the word nei jia to substitute typing out tai chi, chi gung, etc etc.

When I say I went on a *healing journey* it was really a journey in the fullest sense of the word. Everyone starts off as a newb in this business. It takes to time to develop a strategy to self train. Every teacher seems to be selling something different by degrees both minor and major. Not every teacher knows what they are doing. Some teachers know really useful stuff and it takes awhile to both find those teachers and to come to the realization of what the real stuff really is.

In my experience I have met more than one tai chi teacher whose tai chi instruction could actually hurt you. Hurt you as in exacerbate old issues and problems rather than repair them. They simply did not know better.

I’ve met teachers that basically only know how to teach a form or forms. They know the names of every move and they teach it by rote but there is nothing there. It’s been said by some teachers that the design and ingenuity of some of these disciplines is such that even with little or no in depth knowledge of the material one could attain some level of benefit, physically and mentally simply by practicing the forms as directed over and over.

On the other hand if you are lucky enough to find an instructor that is teaching these detailed, usually supposedly *secret* trainings or methods than your options for inner growth and achievement increase significantly.

My first two tai chi teachers had absolutely no idea what they were doing. In the grand scheme of things they taught me some forms but that’s it. They were form technicians and had no other functioning level of knowledge pertaining to the physical, mental or spiritual aspects of tai chi to impart. They were nice people which you find in tai chi circles a lot. They just had no idea about how deep the study went and they had been training in tai chi specifically for 20 years.

During my first year of tai chi training, within literally days of learning some of the *real stuff* from the real deal instructors I could do more with my tai chi and applications than my then-current teachers. Upon demonstrating these advanced methods to those teachers and proving their effectiveness I realized that the time to part ways with them had come. They were learning from me at that point. I did not want to waste my time in fealty to teachers that did not have the goods.

Training with real masters is expensive when you work blue collar. Unskilled manual labor has long hours and low wages. In the late 1990s I could usually keep a roof over my head and stay well fed but to attend a seminar or retreat took months of saving every dollar and cent. I lived in thrift and relative poverty because whatever money I had that was not spend in living expenses or drug habits was spent on my *habit* of wanting to train with quality teachers.

For those viewers and subscribers to my vlog and blog that wondered about the appearance of the material that I espouse so enthusiastically this video is a talk covering some of my physical problems and the solutions to them. I demonstrate small portions of the different things that I tried.

In so many ways this material saved my life. It helped me physically to repair from ingrained tension and unhealed injuries. It balanced my *chemicals* and helped to stabilize my moods thereby warding off depression. It helped me slow down my thoughts. The so called racing thoughts and flights of ideas of mania or manic episodes were largely mitigated through these practices. With a calmer mind, body and heart, nei jia practices enabled me to get really deep into sitting meditation practices. It was in sitting meditation practices that I usually tended to process things like emotionally traumatic memories.

I have never tried to market myself as anything other than a passionate student. The breadth and depth of the material that I was exposed during the first four years of my healing and internal martial arts studies was profound enough for several lifetimes of study. If I had two or three hundred years then perhaps I might master some of the things I learned but in this case I will be learning and refining until the day I die.

At first all I wanted to do was learn the martial stuff. I was fixated on it, no obsessed fanatically with it. But as time wore on I realized that what I needed to heal was to focus on healing. The thought process went something like this.

I want to get powerful and competent at applications and self defense. It turns out if I really and truly was serious about that than I was better off study basic power training exercises as opposed to learning a multitude of mediocre techniques. So it was off to do basic power training until further notice. In the process of doing the power generation basics like circle walking and standing chi gung I came to know more about how much healing my body really needed to do. I was limited to how much *power* I could actually and meaningfully extract from these methods so long as my body remained disconnected and messed up.

That led to focusing more and more on healing techniques. Ostensibly I was now healing myself in order to do power training in order to do real internal martial applications. The longer I worked at healing my body the more intimate I became with my inner world which did translate into the meditation aspects. So now I was finding myself involved more and more with meditation until I found the triggers and glitches that kept me so obsessed with the martial side of things.

On that day I lost my insatiable implacable need to train in martial arts and was able to give myself over to meditation. Then my personality really started to change and I became a person with other interests and capabilities then just martial arts and self defense. Although I lost that obsessive fear driven need to train in martial arts all the time I did not lose my love of them or my appreciation for their healing and defensive capabilities so I continue to practice them.

At the end of the day I can make a strong case that Chinese medicine, chi gung and martial arts had the greatest effects on my mind and body hands down compared to any other treatment or combination of therapies. Chi gung and Nei gung were stronger medicine than the ineffective drugs, herbs, crystals, essences or diets that I had subjected myself in order to heal my spirit.

I passionately endorse the practice of these methods. The real deal teaching will transform your inner world, heal your body and mind and grant capabilities you did not have before. I have passed the first ten year mile marker as an internal arts practitioner. I can point to my more knowledgeable peers and elders in various systems that I have learned from in the past. However due to the many levels of personal success with these practices I am confident I can offer some level of useful training to prospective students and inquiring minds.

To give an honest self assessment my meditation skill set is ahead of my healing skill set which is currently ahead of my martial skill set primarily due to the fact that I hardly ever train rigourously with other people these days since I am wrapped in my book and doing research.

When the book is out and I have had some time to get back in shape I will in all likelihood begin teaching publicly. What I teach then will be entirely dependent on how confident and comfortable I am with whatever I am working on at the time. I can’t practice every method I know simultaneously so some of my techniques will always be more polished than others.

That is the name of my video response to Liz Spikol’s video.

The New York Times in their quest to make information freely available at all times wants me to register to view this article. I am not going to bother at this time so here is the link from Philip Dawdy’s post about the article in the New York Times

Liz asked people to weigh in on their opinions about whether or not suicide was indeed preventable. My answer in short, yes but no.

There are people who have a rough time during an otherwise ordinary or not-too-rough life.

They get depressed and have an impulse suicide. They jump off bridges or grab the nearest firearm and complete their suicide. Some do not and survive. Some of those survivors are grateful for their survival. Some of those grateful survivors will grandstand and wail on and on about how if society would have suicide proofed life for them by putting protective devices on every bridge and building and taking every handgun out of circulation then suicides due to impulse could be prevented. Wouldn’t that be a milestone of social engineering and humanitarian outreach?

Some statistics seem to point out that impulse proofing a popular jump spot cuts down in suicides, in that spot, shockingly enough.

On the topic of firearms? Although I am Californian these days at heart I am a Yankee due to my North East upbringing. I grew up with violence and I also learned how to use firearms safely and responsibly. I am no Annie Oakley but I can shoot a rifle or handgun with some degree of competence and I am not afraid of firearms.

Sure enough a Texan came into the comments section to offer his opinion and some statistics about the reality of suicide and gun control.

Psychetruth:

“ Hehe, gun control to prevent suicide? Did suicides occur before guns were invented? Um yea.

Great Britain has extreme gun control laws and private ownership of fire arms is almost non-existent. Their suicide rate for men is about 40% lower than it is in the US. Their suicide rate for women is about the same.

Japan has tight gun control laws and their suicide rate is TWICE as high as it is in the US. Few gun; high suicide.

Doing away with guns will not stop suicide”

To which I replied, I entirely agree.

There you go, from a Texan and a Yankee gun control will not stop suicide so forget about it and move on to something more productive.

I think I know or partly understand where people are coming from on the issue of impulse suicide prevention.

I remember being somewhat moved with empathy to the comments from one survivor of a Golden Gate Bridge jump.

With that scenario, a completed suicide would have been a tragedy sure I agree. To paraphrase a sentence from the article from over a month ago one jumper is thinking to himself seconds after he lets go of the rail, “What am I doing? What have I done?”. It is easy to think that perhaps he was just at the mercy of his disinterested chemical imbalances.

So fine, somebody makes a civic name for themselves by kid proofing a bridge or a building somewhere. It makes a dent in suicides there and so they pat themselves on the back for their humanitarian efforts and interventions. Brothers keeper and all that.

Don’t think for a second you understand suicide, suicidal motivation or the reasons people suicide.

Don’t think for a second that by passing laws or making safety railings that you can prevent suicide whatsoever.

Don’t even go into that level of hubris and ill deserved self congratulations.

There is a whole level, an entire class of suicide attempts and reasons and solutions that the New York Times does not go into.

Try to safety proof or offer me a social engineering solution to this (kindly sent to me by TJ! thank you!)

BBC documentary: ‘The Trap’ part 1, F*ck you buddy (contains the sub doc ‘The Thud Experiment’.)

The family games, Love as a form of manipulation. Families as a battle ground of controlling mind games. A breeding ground for mental illness followed closely by institutionalizations and intense struggle and failure.

All of it leading to this.

Go ahead and make railings and high fences and congratulate yourself. Just don’t kid yourself about your efforts at suicide prevention. You would have to change the entire fabric of society, family, culture and education to begin to make a real difference in suicidal motivation and attempts.

Unlike Liz I was not remotely grateful for my survival for a long time. Like Liz I survived several suicide attempts due to endless recurring clinical depression. The origins of which I went into in this post recently. Suffice it to say, handing in a crayola crayon drawing to my parents of me, dead, due to a self inflicted knife wound in my heart at the age of 7 was enough to start a decade of on again, off again psychotherapy which ultimately did nothing to do derail several botched ODs.

I had a spike in hits from her site a couple weeks back in response to my Beyond Recovery? post. I guess stating that she was not recovered made her feel defensive. That certainly was not my intent but I can’t apologize for it. Her entire shtick is based on not being recovered from depression and whatnot. Her column is called ‘The Trouble with Spikol’ not ‘The Troubles Spikol used to have’.

It was not too long ago that Philip had a post directing us to her site telling us that Ms Spikol was suffering depression again and might have to step back from blogging as a result. I very much stated that I did not think she was beyond a true and total recovery from depression unlike some of the other examples in my post about the topic. I just thought recovery was an unearned word at that time. I felt the psych term “highly functioning in mainstream despite the presence of illness” was a more honest and more realistic assessment than ‘recovered’.

It was Liz’s vlog that moved me to start my own channel. Her videos about ECT and the Just say yes videos made me so sad and I felt moved. She gave me the inspiration to begin talking about how I got over my own depression and a host of other mental illness as well.

Her candid discussions of clinical depressions and the revelations at the Psychetruth channel about chemical imbalance theory lies that I did not know about for 15 years motivated me to make my vlog and blog about how I got those chemicals balanced again. Glad to hear she has been doing better as of late and I am sure if we had that sit down over coffee she mentioned we would get a better sense of where each other are coming from.

It does not surprise me to find myself at odds with her again over a subject like firearms. During my suicidal times I would never have shot myself. I wanted to go quietly and gracefully and I was willing to stay my suicidal impulse to concoct a suicide kit and leave a note and do it my way. I went out of my way to choose overdose during my very first suicide attempt at age 14.

I chose pills despite the fact that I access to two handguns and several rifles while living in my grandparents house. It was my grandfather that taught me how to shoot and showed me where all the guns were stored in the house. All I had to do was take one of the guns and use it. I chose not to.