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.

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.

Almost a year ago I was emailed several times over the course of a few months by people of all ages being abused through involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations.

Many of the nastier stories seemed to come from the U.K. as a result of their Mental Health Act.

It seemed mere rumours of madness are enough to get people involuntary commited for months at a time over there. I figured we had it good here in the U.S.

As time went by I got more and more stories from Floridians and over and over the Baker Act kept coming up

The last straw was an 18 year old woman who complained to me of being Baker Acted a half dozen times a years for years. The lead figures were her mother and her psychologist who whimsically Baker Acted her over and over again.

I decided to do a little digging about the Baker Act and I found a statute every bit as corrosive as the U.K.’s MH Act.

Finally I decided to give a talk about how one might go about beating this Baker Act.

Elsewhere on this blog I have described the events that led to my various hospitalizations.

In all three cases I got myself released.

It occurred to me I might share some of my experiences in being discharged from psychiatric facilities and use that to offset the power of the Baker Act and the helplessness I felt coming from the people corresponding with me.

This is Beating the Baker Act Redux. It completely replaces my old version of this video, ‘Beating the Baker Act: Habeas Corpus and You. It has been totally redone, extended, edited and such.

If you want more details about the topics or events discussed in the video, you can click on the video to get to the youtube page and read the links in the info box. Likewise you can poke around my posts here using the search function and find related posts or pages.

I had some very emotional responses on the video, mostly positive.

On occasion I did get some amusing negative feedback from Florida psych nurses like this nugget.

“I am a nurse who works in florida w/ patients who are Baker Acted. What you are doing is morally wrong. the vast majority of people I take care of are people who in fact need to be protected. I grant to you that there some people that are Baker Acted but don’t need to be. Yet, you are causing more harm than good. When people are Baker Acted they have to show that they are a harm to others. Or harm to themselves. You should feel ashamed.”

Yea, sure ok. I don’t. In this remastered version I cover that criticism.

I want to clear the air on a few things.

The first thing is an observation. People see what they want to see. Sometimes this filter restricts them from seeing what is actually there.

On my videos, and now here on my blog I have talked about my experiences with mental health services and drugs.

One of the approaches to dealing with mental illness is the psychiatric solution, that solution is management of symptoms through drug therapy.

During my years as a teen, I entered mental health services voluntarily only once. After my suicide attempt by overdose. My paternal grandparents had graciously accepted me into their life and home after I was kicked out the house I grew up in by my stepfather. They were in their late 60s and were at wits end in dealing with my anger, belligerence, depression, bad attitude, confrontational, ill tempered and distance. My suicide attempt was understandably the last straw and my grandmother drove me to a for profit private psychiatric hospital. After my grandparents and my mother gave up their custody rights to the State life proceeded to get even worse.

I now had a social worker from CPS to place me, and when my father’s insurance ran out I was transferred to a state run residential treatment facility for juveniles. From that time forth I had very little rights and very little say over what happened to me.

Over the course of that time frame and afterward I was force medicated with drugs that took me straight to hell. Hell is feeling your mind dying a little each day and watching your lean and fit body decaying into weakness and obesity and being absolutely powerless to stop it. This was the treatment for my diagnosed mental illness. The was the punishment I received because I was suicidal. If it is not clear, let me say that this therapy, this involuntary punishment for my weaknesses did not help me at all. Coupled with the ongoing violence and histrionics of living in places like this. Coupled with my entire family turning their backs on me. I wanted to die even more. My time in mental health services exacerbated every single mental illness inside me. It make more depressed, more manic, more paranoid, more distrustful, more cynical, more desperate, more anxious, more survivalist, more hateful, more suicidal and less physically,mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy every single day.

I fought for both my release, and my right to refuse consent to medical treatment, (i.e.meds) in court when I was 15 and I won my release from that nightmare. I was pardoned for my mental and social crimes and given a fresh chance in society.

Understandably people sometimes hear me talk about Habeous Corpus, restraints and lock downs, they view my psychiatric medication side effect videos and somehow conclude I am either anti psychiatry or anti drug.

This is my statement regarding those things

I am not anti psychiatry.

I do not have any particular fondness for them, but I am not against psychiatry.

One of my loyal viewers z8tl is always reminding me, “Forgive them, they know not what they do”.

This I have done. I am a scientist at heart. I am too terminally right brained and artistically bent to ever be a good scientist myself but I love science. I want science to figure everything out. I want that. For psychiatry, remember Alfred Nobel? He blew himself up in his lab several times learning the formula for TNT. Marie Curie died of her discoveries. I would rather not see people destroyed by the tentative footsteps taken by psychiatry during the stone age of the science. Maybe psychiatry will be noble some day.

For me it was just a nightmare, a total dead end. Psychiatry hurt me and I can never forget it. I can forgive and move on. For that reason I have and will continue to turn down invitations to join groups, organizations or talk about anti psychiatry ideas or agendas in any way. I am not an anti psychiatry activist. That is not my dharma in this life.

Nor am I anti drug. My stance on drugs is this.

What would you do, how would cope with your mental illness 80 years ago? How did any one cope with mental illness from the Dawn of Man until the 1900 AD? How did people cope? How would you cope without modern pharmaceuticals?

That was me from age 15-25.

After I went off psychiatric medications at the age of 15, my mental illness, which had never gone away, eventually took over me again. And again and again. I can not drink alcohol. I can, but I can not drink much. Not much more than a glass of wine or a beer. Slowly. Otherwise, I get extreme vertigo and I lose psycho motor precision. That makes me feel like a cat without whiskers or tail. I have no grace and I feel overwhelmingly vulnerable if I can not walk a straight line. Alcoholism was not possible for me.

I suffered my internal world every day until I discovered pot. The first time I got really really stoned on pot at the age of 18, I had multiple orgasms without touching myself while lying on the floor. For the first time in my life I was physically and neurologically relaxed from the hypervigilance I had experienced all my life. Like going from DefCon 4 to Nirvana. I just cried the whole time in joy. Marijuana not only relaxed me, but enough of it would silence the voices in my head. When that happened, I could think clearly! The manic hurricane would stop and my thoughts came slow and easy to deal with. Nature’s own benzo. Like any other drug pot has its own side effect profile which must be dealt with if one is to keep a therapeutic blood level of this medication at all times. The other issue is that due to it’s legal classification it is not covered by insurance. It can not be patented so it will never be mass marketed. It can occasionally get you in trouble. That is the price you pay for sanity and function. I was able to make living, pay check to pay check and always had my meds so I would not harm myself or others. It was my social responsibility to make sure I was sufficiently medicated before going to work or out shopping in order to manage my mental illness symptoms.

Like many people on psyche meds or illicit ( not immoral…just not patentable* ) I became dependent. It was a long hard road weaning off my meds. Through full time meditation practice and things like tai chi and yoga, my mind and body both eventually simultaneously became calm and quiet enough to move undrugged though life.

During my quest for optimal health and stress reduction, I moved from a state that had both harsh weather and harsh drug use penalites ( N.H. and M.A. ) to a place with clement weather and where one could obtain a medical prescription for marijuana ( C.A.)

This led to me being able to use my meds while sitting in the warm sun during the winter dodging both Seasonal Affect Disorder and the Immorality Police in the process. This led to overall stress reduction and life satisfaction.

As a result of self medicating with an assortment of drugs in my life. I can not and will never be anti drug. An if the anti pharma move destroys all pills in the world and I can not get codeine for my spinal pain, then I will be grateful I can still eat or smoke a natural herb that has so fortuitously been with us since the Neanderthal age. Here in California, if I chose to turn down pharmaceuticals for my pain because I don’t want to deal with those side effects, I still have a choice of alternative natural drugs available to me with far less social stigma then in other states. In fact if I go to a cannabis dispensary I pay California sales tax on any purchases and the local cops are out front making sure no one is harrassed. California voters have decided that it is simply not worth criminalizing it. I love California.

So no, I am not anti drug, and I am not anti psychiatry. I am pro self healing, self therapy, and I have no patience for those that buy the party line that Bipolar and other axis 1 mood and personality disorders have no known cause or cure. That is just not true.

Mental illness sets in because of a rubiks cube-like assortment of factors mostly relating to stress and personality traits. Unmitigated physical, emotional, mental/cognitive, and spiritual stress, alone or in any combination, causes mental illness.

In chinese medicine terms, energy blockages in your mind body and emotional chi. In our cultural and way of thinking, it’s stress.

You then have to work out each facet, each face of this mind-body puzzle-box until the stress and tension of everything about your life will ease up and release you from your symptoms. All those chemicals become balanced again, naturally. Then you have to work at keeping them there as life changes and stress will always be defacing some of the sides of your Rubiks Cube unless you live in a hole or in retreat at an isolated monastery. To function and interact in this modern world and life in this culture is to be always be facing the possibility even inevitability of mind-body-social stress.

You can’t insure yourself against life happening to you. When life happens you have to be vigilant in order not to lose yourself and your sense of who and what you are. If you have never spent any time unraveling your own heart and mind, then you are lost. You seen an alien in the mirror. You do not know who you, why you are here and what you really want. You have just been existing and pressing onward on the steam of subconscious imperatives and stress overwhelms you and mental illness derails you. You not only are trying to reach mental wellness, you have to finish growing up and discover what you really are.

* what can not be patentable must be made illegal to ensure morally upright and civic minded responsible types have no other choice.