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 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.

]]> http://intentions.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/meditation-stillness-and-drug-effects/feed/ 6 Jane http://intentions.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/progress-baker-act-antipsychotics-and-site-details/ http://intentions.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/progress-baker-act-antipsychotics-and-site-details/#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:36:00 +0000 Jane http://intentions.wordpress.com/?p=454 ]]>

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.

Today I released a video on my channel about the use of drugs and meditation progression.

This is for anyone who is interested in the relationship between bipolar or schizophrenic psych meds and meditation. It is also for anyone who is interested in the relationship between other drugs such as pot and meditation, alcohol and meditation, hallucinogens and meditation, anti psychotics and meditation, anti anxiety meds, muscle relaxants, pain killers, aspirin etc.

This video is a talk about different drug effects and how they will help or hinder your meditation progress and why. I am not recommending any drug use at all nor am I offering medical advice. It is a candid discussion about the experience of meditating under the influence of different substances.

Drugs, Meditation and Spirituality

On occasion I get some very moving correspondence from people from all walks of life, from all over the world about my videos and writings.

This post is more about the specifics of processing yourself with meditation. I try to answer questions as honestly as I can and shed some light on the phenomena of experiencing regressions, worsening and mental instability caused by meditation practice.

A recent correspondent sent me substantial background story about their mental health situation and the problems they were facing daily. This person found me from my youtube vids and I assume they know about my recovery strategies because this person wanted to know more about it and what to expect.

My answer was very long and detailed and I wanted to share it with other people who have similar questions and issues.

The context of this quote was pertaining to starting a mind-body discipline lifestyle to recover from mental illness. The individual is gainfully employed and desires to be cured/recovered.

“but if I am to commit myself to finding a cure, then I need to have certainty that I am going to get to the destination I am looking for.”

What you asked, I can not do. I can not guarantee for you or anyone that this will work. What is the adage? The only things certain are death and taxes?

There are no guarantees in this work.

In my enthusiasm I have often thought that what I did, anyone can do. I have had time to rethink that stance and I no longer believe that to be so. I was deeply religious growing up and the discipline of prayer and worship prepared me for meditation in my teens. I got a head start on meditation by studying and practicing it when I was 13. Over time I learned more and more meditation systems and paradigms and the body of knowledge I had concerning meditation and the potential of it expanded and grew.

It is important that you understand I was not following anyone’s master plan for mental wellness here. What I did, I did by living one day at a time. By surrendering my long term fate, destiny and planning I was able to live in the present moment and work on being well only for one day at a time. I had no guarantees when I started this. There was no certainty of anything here. I just wanted to survive the day alive and free from restraint. I found that life went wrong when I interacted with people, so I stopped interacting with people as much as possible and life right away got better and less intense.

What happened was very much like walking through fog blind. One hand outstretched, one foot in front of the other. I stopped worrying about tomorrow and just worried about staying alive and calm from sun up to sun down. That was accomplished best by hiking into the park or driving out to a remote area and meditating all day. After awhile it was my routine and I resented having to go to work because work was a distraction from being alone all day. In time I learned to apply meditation to my job. It is much easier to meditate when doing manual labor than it is to meditate when you are talking on the phone in an office all day.

Eventually I was able to transform my life, employed or not, so that meditation pervaded everything I did at all times. I was meditating when I walked to work or rode my bike. I was meditating on lunch break. I meditated at my work station, on the commute back home, on my way down to the park and then in the park all evening.

“You said you meditated for 8 to 12 hours a day with/without tai chi and yoga. Did you do this while maintaining a full time job? Or were you on social security disability at the time? Or did someone else support you? ”

Yes I did do this while maintaining a full time job. Sometimes a job with mandatory overtime which cut into my healing schedule.

I was not on SSD at the time.

In truth, I worked in blue collar industry. Warehousing, shipping, packing, factory work etc. In that industry you might work 9-5, as in 9 pm to 5 am. You might work 60 hours a week, in 5 days with mandatory OT. Sometimes industry down time causes work slowing which meant maybe working only 4 days a week 8 hours a day.

It meant sometimes months long lay offs. I never had the same work schedule for long from age 18 to about age 22. Around age 23 I got employed with a start up company and stayed with them for several years working all manner of shifts, hours etc. At one point I made it clear that I was not available for overtime any more. Not for peer pressure or financial incentive would do I it. I decided my work time was no more than 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, period. After I punched out at 3:30 pm, I was done with work. I did not think about work for one split second longer and I did not bring work home with me. As soon as I was out of the building I was back in my own world and preparing for my evening workout.

There were firings, quittings and layoffs and whenever I found myself without a job I immediately ramped up my practice to full time.

I lived pay check to pay check on the tightest shoe string budgets in order to keep a roof over my head and to eat. Over time I became quite happy and content being poor and alone in the middle of a modern city living the life of an urban recluse.

“I only want to use what works. I need to know what to do to get results. Please tell me exactly what I need to do to cure myself of this paranoia and depression. I need to know. I need to know what to expect on this path.”

As for what to expect on this path? I can not predict that for you. I can only share what happened to me as a result of forging on ahead with my lifestyle ideals.

What happened is as follows.

When I first started out, I was just plain desperate and at wits end. I did not want to be alive but I felt like the Universe was keeping me alive so I decided to endure one more day. Just one more day. Day in and out.

Over time I began to realize that there were small signs of improvement. Better sleep, more relaxation, less anger, less paranoia, less flashbacks, less pain psychically, physically and mentally.

Then I realized that there might be hope for me after all so I dug in and got even more involved with mind body training.

As I gave myself over to this lifestyle I was buoyant about my prospects. I thought there was a possibility for real change and progress. I had no idea what that would mean though. I found out soon enough what the price would entail.

Dark night of the soul.

For a time, all went well and I was walking on air. I was full of hope and energy and positive I could do this. Things were looking better…

At first the meditation had only positive benefits. I was noticeably calmer, more relaxed and genuinely nicer to be around. Everything was going fine. Meditation was working.

Alone without distractions or diversions eventually the only thing I had to face was me. I began to catch clearer glimpses of what was inside me and what I found was not pleasant. Then the content of my own mind, my emotions, my thoughts began to churn anew making a mockery of my feeble new skills.

The closer I got to my real self, the stormier my mind became. I became deeply afraid I was going to walk off a metaphorical mental cliff and become totally unhinged. There was a feeling that I was going down the well and I could not control the thoughts in my mind. There was a tangible internal sense of a kind of impending doom.

Then it passed. A measure of calm was restored. I got a grip as the expression goes. I resumed my practice, wary but relieved. Days went by and I was all zen and tranquility once more.

Then all hell broke loose.

My entry level grace period into meditation was over. I had put in enough to time to gain inner momentum and the ride began to get more intense. My Sunday drive had become a Hellride.

Waves of panic assailed me. I wondered what I had done to open Pandora’s Box. I wondered if I was ever going to be able to close it again. I was relieving my nightmares more intensely than in years. My flashbacks came, untriggered, unasked for constantly as though I was reliving my past on some level all the time.

Years of pain, rage, denial, insecurity, fear, doubt, self loathing, betrayal, revenge, hate, it was all there inside me like a storm cloud that never went away.

That was only the first wave. That process of descending into hell, riding it out, surfacing, gaining a moment of calm only to descend, sometimes plummet back down occurred again and again. Sometimes over the course of months. Sometimes several times in a day.

Eventually all of my worst fears and problems were revisited. The urge to hurt myself or others came at me in visions and compulsions and intrusive thoughts like a transmission I could not turn off. I was alternately floored into deep depression and red lined into deep mania. I was sometimes psychotic and unpsychotic, over and over in the space of minutes like some kid playing with a light switch. Baseless paranoias, obsessions, compulsions, fixations, inner directive and command voices, the angry mob of voices in my head threatening to break down my castle walls.

The years of unprocessed life events had been adding up. The speed at which I had been propelled through childhood into adulthood had left me without enough time to be a proper teen. I had had not a moments rest to really let life catch up and to decompress and unwind from all the stress in my life. Now the interest that accrued on my debt of unfinished business was due and demanding to be paid.

All these thoughts came at me like a hurricane wind without the influence of any meds at all. This core of darkness and chaos was inside me. It was natural. It was what I had become. I had to face my own evil and look at it in the eye while honestly recognizing it for what it was.

During the worst of it, especially when I understood the extent of my *karma* I begged the Universe, God, whatever, to kill me. I was dead serious and I meant it. At my weakest moments I cried out loud to God, to smite me where I was so I would not have to keep screwing up and making life worse for myself and people around me and turning the wheel.

Through all this I made no phone calls for help. I had no internet to check to see if other meditators were going through what I was. I could not count on the guidance of my teachers because their spiritual offerings were paid for with cash and they were not obliged to teach me how to swim in deep waters having already taught me how to tread water in the shallow zones. Many of my teachers had lives and were not available to tutor me because I happened to be in a meditation crises or experiencing a dark night of the soul.

I endured and I persevered. I stuck with it because I had nothing else to do and I was committed to following this path no matter where it led. Underneath all the trauma, hell and sickness was my Original Mind waiting to be uncovered, literally uncovered from the dust and fog of life’s experience, social programming and knowledge that had obscured it. I knew that in theory, my Original Mind was a tabula rasa upon which I could reprogram the code of my personality if I could get there and stay there long enough to access the matrix.

Perhaps you may wonder, how it was I could bear my own madness unbuffered and live in it without respite, not knowing when or if it would end. I was prepared for that when it happened. I had read the lives the Christian saints as a kid. I was in love with St Francis and St Catherine and many others. I remember when Jesus went into the desert to fast and contemplate, he was assailed by no less than Satan. Other saints had been tormented by visions and visitations while praying in their cells.

From the Three Pillars of Zen I read that visions and demons would come to torment me and it was called makyo and you could work through it as several Zen saints have done.

In Taoism there is a warning of the experiencing all the winds of chi, of having the ten thousand experiences but that like clouds, they would come and go, come and go and I had but to dissolve my attachment to them, to let them go.

I also had inspiration, not from real world saints and mystics but by heroes and mystics in stories of science fiction.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer, Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

The Bene Gesserit ‘Litany Against Fear’

From the Dune Canon created by Frank Herbert

My only anchor during this was that I knew it had been done by others before me. Before I was even born for that matter. Knowing that it had been done by others, I felt I had to try. I really had no choice in the matter but to go in and nakedly face full on the fury of the voices in the whirlwind.

The Country of the Mind (Boldly going where [you] have never gone before)

Like a spaceship burning up on reentry into the atmosphere I stayed the course and continued to breath and dissolve despite the demons and visions and memories and voices that came to plague me.

In time I punched through the lowest cloud deck of my internal world and for the first time I saw my inner landscape clearly or at least part of it. While I was far from hopeless, it very clear that I had a lot of work to do. An incredible amount of work to do. I had to rediscover myself. I had to find myself and map the surrounding country. Find who and what I was and what I wanted. I had to deprogram myself of everything I had been told was important in life and stay present inside my being when I wanted to be anywhere but here, now.

Now that I was touching down on my home world, I was going to have to live here and make the best of the soil I was standing on.

My soil was toxic and dirty. The contamination ran deep. I knew that if I had continued in my life without taking time off to do this, there was a good chance that I would have passed some point of no return sooner or later and become a homeless bum, jail bait or stuck in a chair in a psych ward muttering to myself endlessly.

Underneath all that, once I kept digging deep enough, I found new soil. (to continue this metaphor. ) I had to do a ton of earth moving to expose more of that soil. The crops of personality that I sowed in that small patch of good soil in me were healthy and strong and a variety that no one had seen from me in years if at all. Meditation had started to change me, for the better, one day at a time.

Meditation grows connections in the Prefrontal Cortex

Of course now we know more about the process of meditation and what actually happens in your brain when you do it for long periods of time. Simply put, you grow a meditation circuit of calmness in your brain and after awhile you continue to give off deep brain wave states even when you are not meditating. Meditation makes use of the brain’s ongoing neuroplasticity to heal and to become denser, healthier and more stable.

The mental state of peace instilled from meditation is at first a lifeline. Then it is a crutch. Then it is cane. Then it is you and you are it. No longer a device to stay upright, you are becoming meditation and meditation is becoming you. In time your calm and peace is who you are and not just something you are striving for.

Eventually you blow away the frame and scaffold around your mind and keep only the practice, ontologically speaking. You become what you do. If you do it long enough, you become a meditator and the mind of a meditator repels neurosis and mental distress. It is resistant to depression. It is stable under pressure. It is a natural psychic armor that protects you from sliding back down again. The longer you stick with it, the harder it is to slide back to what you were because of what you are and what you are becoming.

You will change as a person and you will be different. Life will be different and the meaning and purpose to life will be that much the clearer for you.

That is what happened to me. I can’t say for sure that is what will happen to you. You will have to discover your own Country of the Mind. You have to fly through your inner storms and clouds to find your inner world. You have to map out the features of your inner landscape and your world will not be quite the same as my world. All things being equal, we are still humans with brains performing meditation techniques. These trainings have been successfully transmitted and handed down for generation after generation because they work. They work quite well if you are serious about making it work and you have an open ended commitment to stick with it.

A word of caution about meditation teachers and paid enlightenment

Meditation experiences don’t come on cue in a predictable schedule. They happen when they happen. When these experiences happen it will be because you have prepared your mind and consciousness through repetition, practice and patience. It will be because it is time.

Be highly suspect of any teacher or training that promises to shorten your meditation time or offers a quick path or hidden technique to enlightenment or liberation.

A meditation teacher can only show you the gate. You have to go through it. You have to hack down your inner jungle and blaze your own inner paths. No teacher or system can do that for you. It is going to take as long as it takes.

Neurologically speaking, it takes time to grow those meditation circuits in the brain and no lineage master, no two day meditation seminar at any price can grow that circuit for you. You have to do that yourself. You will get out of it what you put into it. The more you practice, the sooner there are results. The longer you stick with it, the more permanent the benefits.

A note on differences in meditation teachings

I have learned a plethora of meditation techniques over the years. Not all these techniques are designed to heal your emotional and mental problems. There are meditation techniques that exist that presuppose you don’t have any major problems and the purpose of those meditation techniques are to open up the psychic functions and full spiritual capabilities of a person’s being.

If those meditation techniques were taught to say…an enthusiastic but insecure, abused thirteen year old with a natural inclination towards witchcraft and the occult. Without supervision and with regular practice, such a teen could theoretically give themselves a severe case of what is called irregular kundulini awakening or meditation psychosis and no one would be around to notice it.

Such a problem would create symptoms identical to what is known in the DSM as mania. Neither this dedicated but damaged teen, nor anyone else in that teen’s life would know it was happening if they themselves did not know what to look for.

A certain amount of unlearning then, needed to be done. Unlearning of what really constitutes meditation practice and what is genuine meditation practice versus occult training designed to unlock your super powers.

You can hurt yourself with meditation. Some techniques of focusing consciousness exacerbate tendencies towards neurosis, grandiosity and a need for personal power. That path may lead to being really intense but it is a false path to pursue those states purely to possess them.

Years of such meditation practice had done me no lasting good whatsoever. Arguably, they made me worse and insufferable. Since I was unable to make it big in life by pursing power as an end to itself at the age of 22 nearly ten years after my initial exposure to meditation training I decided it was time to change my practice.

Taoist Meditation and Relaxing Into Your Being

If you believe in synchronicities then you should realize that it was no coincidence that I found out I lived only 100 miles away from a master of Taoist arts. Bruce Frantzis is a lineage holder and master of several martial arts, chi gung systems, nei gung and meditation.

I had to save every last scrap of money for weeks to be able to afford to train with him. I attended his lectures, seminars, classes and retreats on Taoist meditation. It was worth every cent.

He teaches a technique called dissolving which uses your awareness to release and resolve not just physical pain, but energy blockages, emotional states, mental triggers, psychic noise and so on.

Day after day, hour after hour, millimeter by millimeter I dissolved myself as bit by bit I gradually learned to relax, to surrender into my being.

I went over each and every trigger and relived some of the most horrible things that had happened to me years after it had happened and I survived many unsupervised, solo explorations into my nightmare past.

This method is very soft and gentle and does not cause explosive catharsis, although catharsis happens. It is a method that I used to free myself from the prison of my inner world. It takes the thorn out of your paw. It defuses the triggers of your ticking emotional bombs.

At first, much energy was spent over-dissolving. I threw a massive amount of energy into dissolving. I had been trained to focus fiercely like a beam and my dissolving was poor quality. I could do it, but it was draining and that draining was not the effortless hallmark of water method, of letting go, of effort without striving. I spent the first year or so dissolving like that. It works but it is hard work and it was not supposed to be.

Then I stumbled upon the trick of causing the dissolving reaction by barely dissolving at all. I went instantly from using 1000 volts of focus to get 1 volt of dissolving to using 1 volt of focus and getting 1000 volts of dissolving from it. It was like a technology breakthrough. When you can join with the mindstream, you can use a minimal amount of energy and the reaction sustains and you can dissolve as long as you wish, without interruption, for hours, days and weeks if you so desire.

You go through the top of your head and you work your way down dissolving everything that comes up no matter what it is. Alternately you can dissolve with a purpose. You can open the scrap book of memory lane, visualize faces or events from your past and deal with stuff you know is going be there.

That is how you catch up your past to your present and finally move on and change.

It gets worse before it gets better

Perhaps one of the scariest yet most thrilling aspects of this was the not knowing who or what I was going to be further down the line as a result of this training. I say ‘further down the line’ and not ‘when it’s over’ because it’s never really over.

In the end I was liberated from my emotional (ptsd) triggers and from my internal suffering, just like the masters said would happen. It works if you follow the directions, give yourself to the discipline, make it your life’s work and stick with it no matter what, especially when it seems like it is making you worse off.

That will happen, You will get worse before you get better. There is no escaping that part. You have to face your demons and memories, all of them. The worst of them. When that happens you will be in physical pain, emotional pain, psychic pain and you will want to quit or even die.

But if you quit while you are in the process of triggering yourself without processing and dissolving the triggers, the pain, the events and emotional connections of those triggers and memories will still be waiting for you , right were you left them like an unfinished conversation with someone on the other line. The work will still need to be done and you are back to square one.

Misidentification of self and responsibility

If you have misidentified yourself as a page from the DSM, you must be ready to surrender your labels and all the ways which you identify yourself as diseased. You have to take 100% full responsibility for your personality. It can not be because of the stars or the planets. It can not be the devil making you do it. It can not be some unknown and unspecified chemical imbalance that makes you the way you are. It can not be God’s will that you were made that way for life.

You must not accept any ideal or paradigm that places the cause and blame for your problems on any agent other than yourself and your past. While it may be true that some past abuser or trauma helped shape the way you are now, if you have physical distance from recurring abuse and trauma, you have a say in how long you will continue to behave in scripted fashions while your strings can be jerked around by anyone that sees them.

You have to forgive yourself for being sick and being weak and for failing. You have to decide that becoming sane in this lifetime, means more to you than anything else. For some folks, only when you are desperate enough to renounce everything in life, everything that you are and do. Only then will you be ready to take full measure and full responsibility for your emotional and mental states and begin making the cognitive and lifestyle changes needed to heal.

In the final analysis, and I have said this before. I think you really need to be in a place of being sick of being sick. You have to be sick of who you are, really ready to change and be different. You will feel yourself changing, You may even walk or talk differently over time. You will change and if you can not imagine yourself as being free of mental illness, I assure you, you never will be.

Will it work for everyone?

I don’t think this can work for everyone. Some folks are perpetually in search of someone who can do the work for them! Some folks for better or for worse would exhaust every option to include medically induced harm in an effort or a hope that someone else could fix them some how some way.

As long you expect other people to perform miracles on you. Or if you are in love with your own suffering. As long as you need your pain and the recurring reminders of past events. As long as you expect healing to come from without as opposed to within then the method I have outlined here may be of limited value to you.

This is a path of inner confrontation and resolution. It is powerful and painful and a lot of hard work. It requires much time and effort on your part to do. If you don’t have the time, or the energy. If you are just not ready, then this path is not for you. If you find yourself on this path and stick with it, you will gain a quiet inner strength that you had no idea you were capable of. You will cultivate it. It will always be there when you need it.

So is this the One True Only Way or what?

Not at all. The phenomena of looking down the barrel of madness is old news. People of all faiths, practices, cultures can have a Dark Night of the Soul or grapple with madness and come out ok.

From a meditation point of view. There is always more than one way to go about a thing. This particular approach worked for me. I do think that learning different meditation paradigms and techniques can be of great value to some people.

Among people who have had some classical training as opposed to people trained solely in the more recent New Age meditation inventions there are subtle nuances and refinements to proper technique. It is worth learning them. Knowing or not knowing them can make a difference in how quickly you progress and whether or not you are progressing at all.

Some folks believe meditation is personal and open to interpretation. They believe meditation is whatever you want it to be. That is an opinion I do not agree with.

Basic confusion over what meditation really is, hence what proper practice should be, is what causes these spin offs to gain some traction amongst other meditators but they may have their own value in their own place. They just do not carry well into the realm of mental health repair.

When it comes to lasting healing benefit, there is the expression about the where the rubber hits the road. I have tried many forms of so-called meditation and they do not all lead to the same place. Not at all.

Inspired by a recent post at Furious Seasons and a certain publication today I came up with my own.

New study reveals strong links between depression and being alive.

A recent meta analysis of thousands of cases of people with depression spanning decades has concluded that life causes depression.

It appears that humans are susceptible to varying states of depression for a myriad of reasons.

Anything from wars, natural disasters and politics to personal, financial or family loss and even individuals illness and impairment all have been linked to depression.

These findings clearly indicate the underlying cause of most forms of depression basically amounts to stress in all it’s manifest forms.

There is only so much stress people can take in their lives before the effects of the stress causes changes in the affects of the stressed victim.

Not everyone is built equally in terms of what levels of stress they can take before depression strikes.

One woman’s story is a classic example of this.

“It took me literally years to face the fact that I was depressed and had been for some time. I work 70 hours a week in a high pressure job, my husband is deployed in a war zone. Both my kids have problems. My daughter came down with bipolar at 7 and my son was diagnosed with adhd at age 6. I never get enough sleep, I am always the one dealing with everything. I can never find personal time for myself. It feels like I work for everyone in my life. I began to feel burned out, burned out at everything going on at once every day with no breaks no time off for myself. I was handling it all fine for years then one day I realized I was depressed. I did not think it could happen to me.

Now take my mother for example. She lives with us. She gets up in the morning, takes her coffee and watches tv for two hours. She gets all her information about the world from the Tv. By the second hour she is on the vodka and after two hours of watching tv, seeing and listening to what is going on everywhere in the world, she just crawls back to bed for the rest of the day. She has been like that for years.”

When we interviewed a top depression researcher he had this to say about the strong links between being alive, living a life with unavoidable stresses and the onset of depression.

“Our research indicates that the depression response is hardwired into our genetic makeup. People get stressed [over life events] and they get depressed. It is a weakness coded in the DNA.

We are working hard to find a permanent cure. It is only a matter of time before we develop drugs which specifically target those genes responsible for causing depression and remove them.”

Asked what it would be like to be incapable of depression for the rest of one’s life one scientist had this to say.

“It would be a good thing I think (not being depressed, again, ever ) I mean in today’s world, really who has time to be depressed? If no one were ever depressed it would mean less time missed from work and school. Less money spent in various therapies and interventions. You would have more productivity across the board in every walk of life of those effected by treatment. I mean if a close relative in a family died we expect that the entire family could be moved to depression. That one event could cause a ripple effect.From a performance drop in the kids at school to the parent’s performance in the workplace. Who has time for that anymore? Of what possible good could come from an entire family that was depressed?

We think that is totally avoidable. What we want to do is be able to prevent those performance drops from happening. This would be a good thing for us as a nation, as a people.

Once our parent pharmaceutical company that provided all our research money maintains a patent lock on our genetic depression treatment pill and has made untold billions off of saving Americans from the effects of life itself. We could export this cure to the rest of the world. We need merely look around and we can find depressing things happening to people in all corners of the world.

There are people living lives of squalor and famine or people in strongly polluted, destroyed or war torn areas that could all benefit from a permanent cure for depression in the form of the generic version. As long as the people of the world keep having children, we would continue to have a need to manufacture our cure.”

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.

A few weeks ago I made a video preliminary to this post on my youtube channel.

Recently after catching up on one of my favorite blogs Furious Seasons I encountered yet again the mental health doomcallers of the internets. These doomcallers have a singular belief that major mental health problems, namely personality disorders and Axis 1 spectrum diagnoses are incurable diseases.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In March of 1995 I made good on a promise I made a year earlier. Namely that once I got my life back to a minimal standard, I would try to kill myself once and for all, and do it right.

Since I was seven years old I had been in love with death. Between the ages of 14 and 20 I had made five major suicide attempts and several minor quasi attempts. The only genuine cry for help attention getting suicide attempt was the first. I reported my survival of a suicide attempt to my grandparents and was promptly hospitalized. My life changed from bad to worse soon after and every suicide attempt afterward was *for real*.

So it was that in March of 1995 I shut down my life in a calm and orderly fashion. I quit my job, closed my accounts, paid some bills, packed all my earthly possessions and wrote a detailed last will and testimony. For a week I drove around the coastal and forest country roads enjoying my last days to the fullest. Finally I collected my suicide kit and took myself to a reasonably isolated area at night and euthanized myself. Despite my best planning, I botched the job in a classic how-not-commit suicide blunder. I was dying….slowly. I had failed to get the plastic bag and rubber band around my head. Thus daylight came, exposing my vehicle through the trees and a passing police patrol car investigated.

I woke up in a hospital with tubes coming out of me days afterward having been in a brief coma. That earned me a seven day stay at the hospital psych ward. I signed myself out and planned on trying again soonest.

Several factors stayed my hand for the first week. I was recovering from my failed suicide attempt on my own. Only my brother and my best friend knew what I had done and I had sworn them both to secrecy. I had a documented history of teenage bipolar and schizophrenia and I feared my family being involved in any way.

So I literally hid from the world at my friends house in a rural area. This was actually the beginning of my healing although I did not wholly perceive this at that time.

I needed rest, a long rest from my life and my existence. One way or another it all had to change because the life I lived in the outer world as well as my own inner world were both unacceptable.

Here at my friends house I was permitted to be left the hell alone. I had a outdoor bench swing positioned underneath a pair of giant pine trees with an enormous, expansive view of cornfields and woods. The house was set back about 500 feet off the main road on a long and bending dirt driveway. My friend lived here and he took care of me. Basically he kept me in cigarettes, pot, coffee and frozen dinners. No pressure. He left me alone as I requested. I spent my first day back from the hospital like that. All day I sat on this swing and stared into the distance seeing everything and nothing.

The place was magical. So far off the road, acres in all directions before the nearest house it was deeply quiet. No human voices, no sound of cars. Just the buzzing of the bees, the songs of birds, the wind in the corn. Peaceful. I had my back to the house and faced forward. I felt safe. No one knew I was here. That felt safe. No one bothered me. I survived that day and did much the same again the next day. Then again the day after.

One day at a time. A simple ritual to remain alive.

Wake up, get up. Take my coffee and cigs out to the swing and sit quietly. Stay in the swing all day, all afternoon, all evening. Nothing to do. No where to go. No responsibilities. I sat and stared.

I did this for two weeks straight. It was perhaps one of the most therapeutic things I had ever done. I was deeply calm and centered with the afterglow of my near death experience. Mentally and emotionally, I was calm and quiet. Something I had never before truly achieved in my life. One day at a time I simply existed. I harmed no one. Day by day went by with no stress, no arguing or fighting, nothing to trigger me or set me off. Nothing to do but relax and take stock of what to do.

Eventually I became in tune with the rhythms of nature. My life cycled with the day. I gave myself over to watching both the dawn and the sunset every single day.

I realized that I could stay alive, if I could recreate this ritual every single day. It was a formula for staying alive and taking some pleasure out of life without adding stress to my life. Although I did not fully realize it at that time. I had discovered the most important thing about stress. Namely that by dodging all stress voluntarily, I had escaped life and all the things that set me off. That lack of accumulating daily stress was gradually healing me.

I made a simple goal. Live one day at a time and try to engineer a situation where I could recreate this lifestyle until further notice. I could not stay here forever so I formulated my plan. I would re enter life only so much as needed to maintain a standard of living.

There was nothing I had to do and nothing that needed to be done. There was no way I could be a productive member of society when I had no reason to live. Planning for a future was not even a remote possibility for me. Careers and families are what people who have lives do. I did not have a life worth living and so it made no sense that I could possibly aspire to such lofty goals.

Hard decisions needed to be made and I made them. The results of those decisions and the trial and error methods of self therapy that I undertook out of sheer desperation can be distilled in 12 steps

In this post I will outline 12 steps to permanent recovery from mental illness. Not just bipolar, but also schizo affective disorder with narcissistic tendencies and PTSD.

Here we go.

Location:

The first hard but necessary decision I made was to leave my home state. Within 200 miles of the city I was born in lay most of the places I had grown up in with all the memories and triggers that come with them. The family that had harmed me, and the family that I had harmed were all within this zone. The cops knew me by name on site here and there. I had been fired from two dozen jobs within this zone in less than two years. All my Exes and friends, most everyone that had ever harmed me, or I them, lay within this zone. This zone was the in the center of New England. A place with a bipolar climate with rapid cycling weather.

I was triggered by the entire state. The places the persons and the weather. It all weighed on me. So, I needed to escape. I could not face another winter while I was this vulnerable. Where was I written that I had to stay in the area I was born in? Just because most everyone on both side of my family did, did not mean I had to. I had no compelling reason to stay. Everyone had given up on me. With few friends and no family support there was nothing for me here except more of the same.

The first thing I did was work through the spring and summer. I saved my money and sold off my possessions. In the fall of 1995, just as the leaves were turning colors, I escaped and moved to California.

Although I remained suicidal I persevered through extreme poverty until I was once again gainfully employed and the first thing I did when I had enough money was move into a simple apartment by myself in modest and moderately quiet neighborhood.

More than anything I needed to be alone as much as possible. I had a responsibility to society as an *unmanaged and untreated mentally ill person* I sequestered myself from society for everyone’s good. The task was made infinitely easier that I was now 3000 miles away from all family and friends. I swore off relationships indefinitely. Really as a self harming, self hating deeply suicidal individual I had no business suckering people into relationships with me just to comfort myself. Nor did I have any business having children. I am the child of abusive parenting and the juvenile mental health system. In no way was I capable of being a parent. I knew better than to even think about it. It was all I could do just get through the day.

I reasserted as much of my daily ritual as I could. Namely I got up, sat in the dark smoking my cigarettes and drinking my coffee in silence while watching the sun come up. After an eight or ten hour workday, I came home and repeated the ritual until the sun went down. Bolstered by the far superior climate, free of the stress of relatives and friends and all social life bit by bit I relaxed in my solitude. I stayed alive, one day at a time. My only goal, to repeat my ritual every single day until further notice.

Living:

After choosing a better climate and earning my solitude I focused on simplicity. Since most of my income went to rent, food and drugs I had little to spend on anything else. I had arrived in California with a few bags and boxes containing my one real treasure. My books.

I worked a blue color lifestyle, living paycheck to paycheck. I walked, bussed and biked to work. I needed no car and could not afford psychologically or financially, the nickel and dime maintenance of the purchase of a heavily used car. One less stress, deliberately dodged. The net effect was that I spent more time in commute but stayed healthier physically and financially. My apartment was sparse consisting of lucky sidewalk sale finds or abandoned furniture. I slept on the floor in an empty bedroom. I had a couch, an easy chair, some lamps, my book shelves and books, a coffee table. A simple and sparsely equipped kitchen to match. With few possessions it was easy to keep everything clean and neat and tidy. I had a large amount of space to move and breathe. I kept my apartment much like a zen monastery. I became quite happy living simply and humbly, poor and alone. It was all I wanted. It was all I could handle.

Entertainment:

With no spare cash it was hard to afford entertainment. I lived without Tv, cable, videos, computers. All I had was my CDs and my books and my drugs. I enjoyed all three, every single day. I forgot about the world. Stopped reading the news. Stopped caring about anything else other than myself and staying alive and calm, one day at a time.

Diet:

As time went by I gained more confidence, more control and more stability over my life. I found myself in a space where I could experiment with food and supplements. After reading numerous books on diet and nutrition it finally dawned on me that I was never taught how to take care of myself and that the American food system is severely compromised in many ways. So I played with my diet. I tried eating all meat diet before anyone had ever heard of Atkins. I ate macrobiotic, vegetarian, vegan, took up fasting. Once I learned what the RDA actually meant on foods, I began taking supplements convinced that since I had left State’s custody two year earlier, I had been malnourished. I had stopped drinking plain water after my lithium nightmare at age 14. The effects of taking vitamins and supplements and drinking water as well as eating fruits and vegetables was immediate and profound. Within a week I looked and felt better.

Body:

In 1996 my body betrayed me while at work. My right arm became paralyzed while I was moving heavy objects over my head. Since I had no marketable skills and used my body for manual labor tasking, having one arm malfunction was an immediate emergency.

I had no insurance and little money so what could I do? As luck would have it I met a chiropractor who was also a Reiki practitioner and we were a good match. He took some upper body Xrays and he showed me what was wrong.

Under the years and years of muscular and neurological tension, the combination of the strain of the years, untreated physical problems form car accidents and injuries and perhaps even congenital birth defect. My overall body balance was warped. I was twisted and tortured internally by my own structure. My first ribs on both sides were migrating towards my clavicle, the right side rib was nearly touching my collarbone. My floating ribs were fused to the ribs about them. I had cervical vertebrae degeneration from whiplash and neck injuries. My entire torso, starting from my shoulders and all the way to my pelvis was torqued and twisted.

Without health insurance and a small fortune I could not afford complicated secondary testing procedures, consultations, specialists or surgeons. With limited finances I had to turn to a self therapy modality that offered the hope of healing my body holistically.

For that we turn to…

Exercise:

There is an awful lot of things you can do to quicken your pulse but not all of them reduce stress while building physical, emotional and mental strength. Skating, snowboarding, jogging, karate, weight training can all work out your body. Each of them contains possibilities of damaging your body suddenly or over time. Each of them requires their own gear or special facilities. None of those things will necessarily rehab your mind and body and emotions.

I turned to Tai Chi and Qi Gong. After reading several books on the subject I chose to start training in Taoist Energy Arts. I saved my paychecks and took seminars, retreats and classes with Master Bruce Frantzis. I studied his Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Hsin I and Ba Gua. Once I had a basic working understanding and instruction the next step was to practice as much as I could. Gradually I began with fifteen to thirty minute workouts. As I became stronger I worked harder and longer. Eventually I could practice for an hour, then two. Then eventually three, then four, five and six hours.

In 1996 my life was now focused entirely on my practice of self healing.

4 am, wakeup

4:30 am, bike down to the river and warm up with qi gong and move into tai chi. Greet the sun as it came up.

Work out until 7:30. Bike to work.

From 8 am to 4 pm, monday through friday, punch a clock at the warehouse.

4:30 pm, I am home. Take 30 minutes, smoke a joint. Bike back down to the river.

5:oo pm, I begin again, qi gong for an hour, tai chi for two hours. Watch the sun go down.

8:30, bike home

9:00 pm, dinner.

9:30 go to bed

4 am, start all over.

On weekends without work, I simply got up at 5 am instead and spent the entire day down in the park working out in shifts. 2 hours of tai chi, hour long break, another 2 hours of tai chi, take an hour off, repeat until dusk.

Gradually I trained myself to relax. I repatterned my body’s soft tissues and structures.

Gradually I developed a smooth, agile, sensitive, alive and graceful movement with power and precision.

The act of tasking the mind to command the body down to precise movements inside myself strengthened my focus and my will. Gradually, the chemical imbalance caused by 20 years of depression slowly rebalanced, a little bit each day, the same way I fell out of balance.

With my diet, stress and body now under control. I was changing. I was in a new space with a new resolve built off success and practice. It was time to take the next step.

Detox:

For years I was fiercely dependent upon and habituated to several chemicals. I was now willing to experiment with removing the crutches I depended on for so long to cope with myself and my life.

It was time to detox. I had been a heavy smoker of both cigarettes and marijuana. I drank 40 plus ounces of coffee a day and drank a two liter bottle of pepsi a day. I was dependent on nicotine, caffeine, marijuana, and sugar.

I detoxed cold turkey in one of the most mentally, physically and emotionally agonizing self inflicted treatment I have ever done. The first time around I failed to quit cannabis, and instead, relied upon it even heavier to deal with the multiple withdrawals occurring at once.

Much the same way as heroin users are given methadone or benzos to deal with the multilevel pains of heroin detox I relied on massive doses of cannabis. I could not practice meditation during that time and instead, I suffered in solitude. I stayed away from everyone not wishing to burden my few acquaintances with my problems and moods while engrossed in my own suffering.

I did learn a lesson from the sheer agony of the withdrawal and when it was time to detach from my cannabis addiction I tapered myself on my own until I was capable of relying only on tai chi and meditation for my support.

Distance:

Some of distance I covered before here and there and it is worth mentioning again. Misery loved company. When I was in my late teens I was unable to find and attract healthy people to me. Instead I tended to gravitate to the wounded and the damaged personalities. Other mentally ill people with problems like mine.

There is all sorts of distance to be maintained for myriad reasons.

Distance from maternal family. Not hard. Most everyone on that side has severe untreated mental illness and a history of physical and psycho emotional violence and drama. I could not save them, they could not save me.

Distance from paternal family. Most of that family is of the WASP cast. Self sufficient and distant. I had only access to my grandparents. I abused and used them terribly while humiliating them with my mental health problems and criminal activities. I chose to exile myself from them in the hopes of minimizing the danger of my personality to them.

Distance from mentally ill friends. Necessary. Can not save them. Am not responsible for them. Can not make the changes I need to in my life, when all my friends are users, depressives, borderlines, deadbeats, neurotic welfare cases. Painful but necessary to cut them loose and focus on my survival and not maintain sick relationships with sick people.

Distance from society. With the exception of work, once a week shopping and martial arts classes, I exiled myself from the warp and woof of humanity in order to stay stress free and uncomplicated. Nothing was allowed to derail or interrupt my self imposed mind body discipline and asceticism.

I maintained my distance to distraction. You can not be focusing six hours a day on self therapy if you are out roller blading with your girlfriends or making the scene at the clubs. You can’t. Like wise you can not focus six hours a day on only you if you have a girlfriend, boyfriend or a child. You can not give those people the necessary attention to forge and cultivate relationships. You have to have undisturbed dedicated me time.

In a narcissistic twist, you have to acknowledge your selfish investment in your own life. You are the most important person in your world. Your whole life revolves around you. That is exactly how it should be. If you are not dragging dependent or expectant people around, no one will be harmed by your necessary selfishness. You know you are not capable for forging relationships with others when you can not spare the time to deal with them. So stay away from them. Besides, now that you are changing as a person, you may find you are no longer attracted to those broken and hollow people that you were before.

Beliefs:

Your beliefs about your life and your condition have everything to do with whether or not you can take over responsibility for your life and your recovery. Although I am reluctant to scapegoat religion, religion poses a serious threat to your spiritual wellbeing.

Take these examples.

My Bipolar mother, convinced that there is nothing wrong with her, believes that her depression is a burden of life. It is cross she was given to bear from God himself. She truly believes that if God did not want her depressed, He would shine His divine countenance on her and remove the depression. In the meantime, all she can hope for is to cling to her cigarettes and rosary, pray every day to make sure she goes to Heaven and wait for the afterlife to enjoy peace and joy. That is a self destructive belief that will never render a cure.

Likewise, I take personal issue with several of the Alcoholics 12 steps to recovery as well.

Talk about a recipe for helplessness

• Step 1 – We admitted we were powerless over our mental health diagnoses – that our lives had become unmanageable
• Step 2 – Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
• Step 3 – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
• Step 5 – Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
• Step 6 – Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character

• Step 7 – Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings

Let us look at this closely. The person that came up with these steps to *serenity* quite probably never knew about Yoga and yogis. Those mind and body masters of the Far East capable of controlling their body, their mind, and their emotions to a level unthinkable by most Westerners. Just to be able to sit still for hours at a time without distraction or idle thinking is a practice beyond most people in this culture. It requires mental discipline to control your mind and body to that extent.

We are not worried about sitting naked on a block of ice or sleeping on a bed of nails. We just want a basic level of impulse control and thought control. To do that, we must do the opposite of those  serenity steps you must

Admit to yourself that yes, your life had become unmanageable but deep inside us all lies the power to make major changes and that power means we are far from helpless.

You can not wait around forever hoping some deity will take time out of running the universe just to visit you and make your life a little more bearable whilst ignoring the other billion inhabitants on this earth that lay claim to needed help just as much you. You have to say this is the time and place that I chose to regain control of my life.The only person capable of restoring sanity to you in your lifetime is you.

Again I take personal offense at the inspired selfishness and helplessness that goes into these serenity steps. Why are you so important to the functioning of the universe that god most come answer your humble call to remove the shortcoming that He in his divinity saw fit to give you to strengthen and humble you? Why do you deserve god to help you personally and not again the other billions of people with a need as well? What have you done with your life that has earned divine intervention?

Those steps to serenity are basically selfish affirmations of helplessness and disempowerment. If God could not spare me and my brothers and sisters the years of abuse, why should God come along and spare you from your alcoholism? Why do you deserve God’s interference and we do not? I asked. I begged and prayed for intervention back when I believed and it never happened. Now you want God to come and pluck your defects away because you can’t handle it anymore. What ever happened to God helps those that help themselves?

I gave up on God a long time ago. When I chose to undertake self healing it was because I knew, it was up to no one, mortal or immortal to heal me for me. The only person capable of healing me is me. I finally wanted it bad enough to make it happen no matter the cost.

That is why I say, reviewing your beliefs is majorly important if you want to heal yourself. You can’t heal yourself if you are waiting for God to do it, or if you think your mental problems are your burden in life. Those beliefs are useless to the person that is bent on recovery. You agree that you take full responsibility for your behavior. It is not your astrological sign, your karma, your genes, or your cross. It is entirely up to you whether or not you want to spend the rest of your life mentally ill. It is that simple. Accept no beliefs that pass the buck off to agencies or deities. Your behavior is controllable and you will do it. It is that or suffer until you die.

Meditation:

I have written much about meditation already. This post covers everything I have to say about meditation. Meditation, mental health and the brain.

Meditation was the Rosetta Stone, the real cure for my brain.

Self Love:

Some people never give it a thought. Many people, if asked are not entirely sure one way or the other. I knew though. I loathed myself. I hated myself since I was a child. I felt like an alien. I hated my existence, my life, my body, everything about myself.

The most powerful meditation experience of my life occurred towards the end of my 25th year. I had become more and more comfortable with myself and my life by sticking to my regimen. I had learned to relax and let go. I had mastered stress management. I had control over my life. I had not been depressed in years. Thousands of hours of meditation had stilled my racing thoughts. Until that experience, I did not truly love myself. After this meditation experience I did. Once I gained true unconditional, unambiguous and total self love, I no longer wanted to die. I now had a reason to live. I knew I would never self injure again. Indeed, ever since then, I have been in balance and free of suicidal depression.

Labels:

Once you have achieved recovery, what use is the label? No matter what is it. Once I had resolved all my triggers, I was no longer suffering from PTSD. The label no longer accurately described my behavior so I dropped it. Once the delusions and egocentricity as well as the Voices had left me, I was no longer Schizoaffective. One the depression and mania had left me. I was no longer Bipolar. It was time to move on and get over having ever been mentally ill. One of my personal secrets is this. I never believed I had a lifelong disease in my mental health problems. I was indoctrinated into believing I had various chemical imbalances beyond my control due to genetics.

Certainly, if you look at my bipolar mother and sister, the hereditary disposition is undeniably obvious. My mother was the head bipolar vampire who manufactured one mentally ill child after another. Of her first four children I alone am recovered. My mother is incapable of believing she has any problems so, she remains untreated and symptomatic. My sister, now in the clutches of the mental health system, is currently being programmed to believe that like the alcoholic, she is powerless over her genetic mental health problems. She is receiving the standard dual therapies of medications and counseling. She lives in an adult group home, disabled by her mental problems. She is not recovering. She is, in the psychiatric jargon, learning to accept her diagnoses and the treatments. With one brother in jail and the other with his periodic cycling depressions, family mental illness is endemic. How is it I am no longer mentally ill? I took the path least traveled, and it made all the difference.

As a teen and as an adult, I knew I had problems. I was never in denial that I was mentally ill. When you are living on the street homeless, addicted, penniless, with bench warrants for your arrest for petty crimes. When your family has given up on you and you have given up on them, When you try to commit suicide every other year and destroy your own relationships and employment. It is hard to deny the evidence before your eyes. I was clinically insane for a long long time. Now I am sane. The steps I took directly led to that sanity. No one in my family has taken those steps.

To summarize in no particular order.

Step 1 distance, distance from anyone that is toxic or abusive or anyone that will not facilitate your recovery. In short, if they have worse mental health problems than you, stay away from them.

Step 2 location, where is it written that you have to suffer the climate you were born to? Who said? I was raised in New England, and New England is depressing. So I moved to sunny California and staved off SAD and felt genuinely better to have more sun and blue skies than than I had grown up with.

Step 3. Lifestyle. Our American lifestyle is stress overload. Who said you have to participate? Get off the stress track. Quit your job if you must. Live simply. I became quite happy living poor and alone. Much like the Taoist sages of ancient China.

Step 4. Diet. When you hate yourself it is much harder to make motivated healthy choices and take up good healthy eating habits. You have to experiment with food and how it can support your mental health through augmenting your physical health.

Step 5 detox. Toxins abound in our society. All of them we can do without. The caffeine, the alcohol, the uppers and downers, the psych meds, cigarettes, sugars, processed foods. Seriously, get rid of all that, and see how healthy you can become.

Step 6 Body. Back problems, weight problems, structural problems, congenital birth defects, diseases, all that stuff complicates and exacerbates stress and mental health problems. All those things must be addressed in order to find yourself underneath it all.

Step 7 Exercise. A walk around the block is just not enough to get your body to burn off weight and raise seratonin levels. There are many sports and activities that just add stress and require specialized equipment or having repetitive risks associated with them.

Tai Chi requires nothing but the clothes on your body and decent shoes. With yoga, people still crave comfort in mats, spaces and outfits. Tai Chi is simple. Stand up and do it. In your home, in your backyard, at a park. Once learned, you never need other people around you or a special area. You can do tai chi and it will both strengthen and relax, your body, emotions and mind. It really is the most brilliantly engineered exercise ever created.

Step 8, check your beliefs. If you believe you truly have a cross to bear in your mental problems or you are waiting for the day God comes down and fixes you, you will never recover. If you believe you have in incurable genetic disease, you will never recover. Both beliefs must go.

Step 9, Meditate. When I started meditation, I could not sit still for more than ten minutes. Today, I can sit for days at a time without interruption, easily. Meditation builds that circuit in your brain which controls mental and emotional processing. I have that circuit, as does any serious meditator whether they be yoga, buddhist, zen, taoist, whatever. I built that circuit and chances are, you have not. Work on it.

Step 10, self love. Once again, without it, you are bound to self injure or self destruct sooner or later. With it, you will not be depressed, even if you are poor and alone, you will be content.

Step 11 entertainment. Say have you seen the news lately? Depressing isn’t it? Frustrated by politics, sports, absorbed in the lives of others? If your spare time amounts to getting emotionally worked up by reading horrible psychiatry nightmares or watching war footage in Iraq, how is that reducing stress and putting you in a calm state? That is not to say you can never do those things. I am just saying, in the initial stages of recovery, when your sanity is literally a house of thin cards swaying in the breeze. It is unwise to burden yourself with stress by constantly exposing yourself to stressful entertainment or research until you are emotionally stable

Step 12. Lose the label. Do it first or do it last, either way, you are not your diagnoses. It is not you. It may describe your behaviors when you are symptomatic, but do not identify your personality as being diseased or there is no hope for you. When you are no longer symptomatic, lose the label, really it no longer matters, it has no power over you.

For years after my recovery I simply moved on. I no longer needed to meditate six hours a day to stay clear and calm. I had built mental stability into my system and was now capable of re-entering society and doing the things I had put off since age 20. I was able to make friends, have fun, be social, keep a job, have romantic relationships, make career plans. I could add stress to my life, and not become manic or depressed. I was normal. I could handle *normal mainstream life* again. I put the past behind me and moved on. Eventually I got back onto the internet and discovered that while I was curing myself of manic depression, bipolar had morphed into an epidemic and I realized the time had finally come to speak up.