Two mental health laws I would love to see passed
If you are looking to get angry about something, you don’t have to look very far. One thing that has the power to get me angry is my knowledge of the current use of psychiatric drugs in teens, children and toddlers. I am going to tell you plainly that I think it is a crime against their minds, bodies and spirits. For that reason, if I had the power, I would enact a law that would permanently ban the use of any and all psychiatric drugs in people under the age of eighteen.
If an eighteen year old wants to ask for meds, then that’s great. But under that age, I think kids need to be given the right and incentive to learn to control their emotions on their own, using their own resourcefulness and ability, along with the normal process of maturation. At least until a person is safely past the hormone tides of puberty so that normal sexual maturation and the hormone flows that come with it are not misidentified as being a mood disorder, which I suspect is what is going in a large number of cases of teen bipolar these days.
There is another group of individuals that is just as vulnerable, actually, far more vulnerable to unnecessary psych med exposure and that is unborn children. Unborn children have no way to escape the mother’s psych med use. They do not have informed consent and they can not refuse this unasked-for and unwarranted ‘treatment’.
Each and every psych med in existence has the potential to damage the brain, the CNS and the internal organs. Infants born to mothers who take antiseizure meds have retardation, cleft palate and spina bifata. I’ve heard of one case where a baby had to be put on dialysis because the mother was on lithium. Can you not see how awful it is to be spending the first nine months of your formative life being exposed to a chemically toxic womb? Or letting your infant, suckle down Risperdal or lithium-tainted breast milk? I think it’s very selfish on the part of the mother to knowingly expose her own offspring—who gets one chance and one chance only, to get through those nine months intact to get the best head-start on life—to the potential dangers of psychiatric drugs. Psych med damaged infants are absolutely, one hundred percent avoidable.
Why are you treating your baby for your mental problems?
All we need is a law which protects children from being exposed to psych meds in utero. I mean seriously, if you are taking lithium or depakote or seroquel it’s not because you are fine, it’s because you are not fine. What makes you think you have the right to needlessly expose your childs’ vulnerable and growing body to your drugs, Ma? Potential mothers should have to make a choice, psych meds or pregnancy, not both. I remember how awful lithium and Trilafon made me feel and I don’t think it’s right to expose an infant or a prenate to psych meds, even if diluted down somewhat. Especially because scientists don’t know what the long term effects are. Think about this: babies are much smaller than you Ma, so a little drug can go a long way.
Children have absolutely no business partaking of those drugs in utero or through breast-feeding. And until there are some major advances in psych meds in general, then I think there ought to be a law making it illegal to expose a prenate or infant to psych meds. We don’t know enough about the long term effects of prenatal and post natal exposure to psych meds and we should be erring on the side of caution in the interests of giving every child the best possible start at life. But in this day and age, corporate interests and profit margins are often more of a concern to agencies like the FDA than public safety, and the future is always later, so we have the mentality of “do it now and pay for it down the road when we get the bill”. Hindsight is always so much easier to possess than foresight.
Related topics and links
The effects of antipsychotic tainted breast milk and womb environment *
Paxil Babies *
Lithium Babies *
More about lithium as a teratogen * (birth defect agent)
Depakote * and Lamictal * cause major birth defects, including death, are taken for bipolar symptom management, and their pharmokinetic action on bipolar mood swings is considered ‘unknown’. Seriously, wtf.
Do psychiatric medications impair brain development? *
An anonymous commenter from Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America blog wrote:
“I was put on SSRIs when I was young for OCD. I now do not get high and low feelings as I think most humans get. I feel emotionally flat every day. I also do not experience any pleasure when I touch myself, am unable to have orgasm nor enjoy sex. I thought this was all normal but deep down I knew it wasn’t. I want to fall in love but I literally am unable to. I decided to look this up and I guess I realize why I have these issues, and I don’t know if I will be like this the rest of my life but I really hope not. It is a very gray life.”
Please stop child drugging now.
Thank you for this post.
I agree with you 100 percent!
Duane Sherry
By: duanesherry on January 28, 2011
at 3:35 pm
You are very welcome, Duane.
By: Jane on January 28, 2011
at 5:25 pm
Some good links for parents…
From Psychiatrist, Peter Breggin, M.D. -
http://breggin.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38
From the Alliance for Human Research Protection -
http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/blogsection/5/52/
Thank you again, Jane for putting up this much-needed post.
Parents need to know about the dangers of these drugs for children, and we, as a society need to make certain children are protected!
Duane Sherry
By: duanesherry on January 29, 2011
at 7:48 pm
Certainly, Duane. And thanks for the links.
By: Jane on January 30, 2011
at 9:00 am
I agree.
To be honest, if you are so unstable that you require neuroleptic medication, pregnancy sounds like a really really bad idea. While women are taking these medications the psychiatrist should advise birth control. It’s not fair at all for women to be on a bevy of brain and body damaging medications, without the doctor giving these women informed consent that using these drugs can and will cause serious birth defects.
Do you know why psychiatrists refuse to tell patients this? Because they don’t want to lose the client. The psychiatrist misrepresents the safety of the treatment, does not care if his client ends up giving birth to a severely malformed human being, a cruelty to both child and mother. This is malpractice, it’s criminal.
Sometimes we have to make choices in life. Sometimes we have to be responsible human beings. Being mentally ill does not make one a child incapable of handling any responsibility, although psychiatrists and medical establishment like to push that angle so the mentally ill are easier to manipulate.
Sometimes we have to choose between treatment, stability, or motherhood. If one has a health problem which makes them dependent on neuroleptic medications, and if those medications are teratogens, the only responsible thing to do is to take birth control and not get pregnant while using those teratogenic medications.
When a reproductive aged woman takes spiranolactone (a diuretic) for a health condition, she is advised , if not instructed/demanded to go on birth control medication. Spiranolactone is an antigandrogen which is tereatogenic in the male fetus.
Why this double standard for psych meds? Why arent clients given informed consent about treatments? Oh thats right,psychiatry is a horrible scam – people who don’t need services are using them and being manipulated into purchasing more and more drugs…meanwhile uninsured people who DO need psychiatric intervention are ignored and left to wander the streets because they are unprofitable.
It’s pretty horrible.
By: itsthewooo on February 2, 2011
at 12:11 pm
Great insights ITW.
Thanks for weighing in on an important subject that is not getting enough attention at the moment.
By: Jane on February 3, 2011
at 7:16 pm
Serendipitous!
I will shortly be facing some Pharma propagandists on this very subject and I need to be forearmed with facts and arguments. This is the first time I will met these kind of people face to face and I need to hone my social skills here. I’ve heard them on the TV, Radio, Internet, newspaper and they always make my blood boil – and in all of that propaganda warfare such as those panels and radio call-ins I do not hear a single voice such as mine.
The people I will face will be a pair of parents (or more) that are going around to various groups giving talks the purpose of which is “to try to end the stigma”and the main message will be things like “early diagnosis and treatment with medication” of SZ particularly in the schools and childhood. Of course (early diagnosis) that means “early doping” Yeah – we know that.
…
This particular couple had some terrible problem with their SZ daughter – but – how wonderful – it has been mostly resolved by medication. And this will be their message and they are pro-actively propagandizing for “early diagnosis and treatment”.
.
Please link me to as much counter-arguments and material that you may have that may be helpful.
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I thin their main argument will be how they have ended their daughter’s “suffering” – “suffering” here is the “righteous cause” , the casus belli “, the cause to go to war against the “incurable disease” with drugs. And I can imagine how the reports will be from the daughter and family how life is much “better” now. Also I suppose in their guilt they have to justify their actions by promulgating this action – very much to my mind the same psychology in the Rwandan Genocide when the perpetrators started killing – they had to keep killing in order to maintain their sense of justification and avoid introspection.
These are some of the things I think I might expect, but I have never had a face off with these kind of people before – presuming they don’t pre-empt me somehow – it should be interesting to see what will transpire.
So here is one of the forces that the “real” human beings are up against (versus the unreal nation of the drugged that Pharma wants to create) is that Pharma is using their clients and their clients’ families to propagandize and aggressively market their drugs. (By the way , you will note on Eli May’s website they have a pronouncement how much they resent “government interference with the sale of their r psychotropic drugs).
So Big Pharma is actively recruiting parents like these to promote their message and drug market sales. (I don’t yet know how these people got on their advocacy, but it has to have been propped up directly by Pharma or Biomed psychiatrists.
Also in the SZ society they are actively presenting 10 week “educational programs” for friends and family of SZ clients. These programs are taught by SZ clients who have been indoctrinated by Pharma representatives or Biomed psychiatrists. So an extensive machine is set in motion co-opting the victims themselves into further victimization of others in society – very smart.
These propagandization programs are more than just meant to instill the need to medicate they are to promote the “brain disease” viewpoint and to deny all alternative ideas and methods that might facilitate personality growth. All the ideas of these programs completely oppose what is necessary for people, anybody, to grow in their ordinary everyday emotional interactions.
The manual they use (yes they have one) might just as well be called “How to instill a lifeless society”.
That is group propagandization to the entire society of not just medicating people but a way of thinking which is a way of maintaining personality death – a way of attacking and stopping all ideas of personality growth not just for those in trouble but the entire population..
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I’ve heard on some call-in radio programs Chief Psychiatrists from various hospitals once again advocating” early diagnosis and treatment” – deceitfully not mentioning that this means early drug lobotomization. I will go with the more colorful word here because it is what it is and people should realize the real deepest, user, human meaning of what is happening here.
Yes, one of my relatives, a psychiatrist, put his 11 year old daughter on meds when she was 11. He gave her life long problems. He figured drugging her was a good way for her to cope with the tragedy of her losing her mother at an early age and it spared him form having to deal with her angry tantrums. That is one way to win an argument! The daughter – my relative – has had life ling problems now because of that and is still unhappily , self-admitted, addicted to the meds.
It seems that there is a high natural remission rate – by that I mean people who pass through SZ somehow. There were many more so before the masses became over-drugged. If people are not allowed to develop problems they can never resolve them, there can’t be happiness without unhappiness , if madness is not allowed to develop the heatlh cannot be achieved. Nipping people “in the bud” by medicating them simply will end their chance to have a real , full emotional life. People need to have the right to go mad. Meds need to be used in the most sparing way and always growth process such as psychotherapy need to be applied first, not last nor never.
There is so much to this and oh yes – there is the negative effects of meds in general on people – I need more information on that
By: skybluesight on March 12, 2011
at 4:25 pm
Thank everyone who commented and participated in my posting here. I have tried to make an honest effort to understand all sides and perspectives in the current war of information and ideology of the treatment of mental illness.
And I know, that my way, if not the right way, or the only way, is in fact a better way, no two ways about it.
Take care folks,
love,
Jane
By: Jane on April 26, 2011
at 9:57 am