I know, and now you know,  that there is a wealth of information contradictary to the prevailing medical model which is not allowed to get into colleges, medical schools, and graduate schools. There are many psychological and economic reasons for this situation. Without medications, electroshock, or lobotomy and the theories which support their use, psychiatry would not be able to retain its power over the mental health field.  What is sorely needed in the field are non- pathological voluntary environments designed by consumers and professionals together where those in mental distress can rediscover and rebuild their lost innate skills of self-regulation, self reliance and self confidence. Full Spectrum was such a place and I hope its kind of supportive environment and perspective on psychological distress will spread to a systemic level in the world. Consumers and professionals must collaborate and those professionals must make no distinction between them and the people they are dedicated to both helping and learning from. Those professionals will know that at any time they could become a consumer and that therefore consumers are their teachers and their potential support system. There is a level of humility and non-judgment that needs to be integrated into the heart and practice of every mental health professional. To end, my simple but powerful belief, stemming from my personal and professional experience, is that those of us who experience psychological distress, even severely debilitating distress, can fully recover from our temporary  or chronic distress and return to a more satisfying life without medication and without professional support. We, the people, of the united human species, can do this by integrating our personal and collective needs through social activism and take the necessary steps towards our next stage in evolution creating a healthier human society and avoiding causing our own extinction.

I was born and raised inside the rarified, atmosphere of the ruling class whose power over major economic, political, and social decisions unfortunately controls the course of our species. The people who surrounded me in my childhood were the most psychologically distressed humans I have ever met, and I have certainly met some in my professional life. Although I still suffer from the severely psychologically distressed nature of my childhood, it was a perfect training ground for my later work with people suffering from psychosis, delusions, and chronic addiction. In a sense, I feel that I was immersed for twenty years in an acute ward for the criminally insane, witnessing first-hand the creation and maintenance of the psychological mindset which can allow a human being to completely disregard the suffering of other human beings in the pursuit of wealth, power, and luxury. I was encouraged to view this very cold, cruel mindset as the way “normal” people lived their lives. Although I will always have compassion for the people who raised me, I do hold them responsible for their resistance to healing themselves and their unwillingness to acknowledge their continuing role in destroying our planet and the health of our species. Like me, they were born with an advanced stage of the emotional plague afflicting all of us. It is up to each of us to make the choice to heal ourselves. I have spent the last twenty years struggling to do just that. Fortunately, I have stumbled onto several people and approaches to recovery which have enabled me to avoid  becoming yet another cancer cell in the body of the human species.

I still suffer from the trauma of my childhood and still have much work ahead of me. The Full Spectrum Approach has developed as result of my search for personal healing. My search has also led me into my professional training as a healer. Unfortunately, I have found that most of the information contained in my psychological training is outdated, incorrect, and dangerous to those subjected to its theories, practices, and products. Almost all of my teachers, supervisors, and fellow students were invested in believing in the medical model of mental illness. Those that were not were too afraid for their jobs or loan statuses to either speak out themselves or support me in my perspective. As they kept their jobs and loans and kept their mouths shut, I was ridiculed, suspended, and made to suffer for my convictions.

Here are some thoughts and feelings which often threaten to overwhelm me. These are heavy issues which might overwhelm me if I had not been supported through intensive therapeutic work to develop positive responses to the anger, frustration, and sadness which rise up in me when I consider our situation on this planet at this time. One of my positive responses is to channel my feelings into promoting social justice and especially into trying to change the status quo in the field of psychology. I am also a very vocal organic food and healthy nutrition activist, because the toxic chemicals which destroy our ability to maintain our health are not just found in the prescription drugs we are fed by the medical and pharmaceutical industries. They are found as the major ingredients in the food most of us have been taught to feed to ourselves every day. In addition to deep personal work and working with others toward promoting social justice, the Full Spectrum Approach encourages everyone to eat as much fresh, raw, organic foods as possible and to become as vigilant and vocal about avoiding eating and drinking processed and genetically-modified foods as we are in avoiding the use of toxic and ineffective medications.

It is now clearly apparent that the currently increasing rate of climactic change is a direct consequence of our irresponsible production of industrial wastes and our suicidal denial of our continuing destruction of our own habitat. We are quickly altering the composition of all the essential elements composing the specific recipe of air, water, and soil which created the conditions for our initial and continued appearance on this planet. In our race to conquer our environment and each other, we are rapidly changing our habitat into a hostile eco-system which is toxic to our form of life. Unless we are willing to acknowledge our responsibility and radically change our behavior, it seems likely to me that we will continue to poison our species beyond our thresh-hold for survival, causing our own extinction.

If we are to survive as a species, certain essentially psychological issues concerning accepted individual and collective human behavior must be addressed and sufficiently resolved as soon as possible. Like old clothes which do not fit anymore because we have grown out of them, we must evolve emotionally and discard our childish, greedy, self-destructive thoughts and behaviors. We must begin by discarding our incorrect assumptions concerning the unchangeability of our human nature or die clinging to our outdated models.

Contrary to prevailing psychological propaganda which currently reduces our behavior to genetic and biological programming, radical change in both individual and collective human behavior is possible. Medications and other psychiatric treatments only prevent access to our powerful ability to change our beliefs and our behavior. Without an ability to radically change our behavior, our species would not have survived previous threats to our existence such as climactic changes and plagues. The difference this time is that we have become the threat to our own existence through our unwillingness to change our beliefs. Our own self-centered attitude towards our environment and each other is the plague which threatens to kill us off. If we do not radically change our behavior soon, we will not survive much longer. Global warming, the acidification of our seas, widespread poverty and hunger our constant state of warfare against our environment, other humans, and ourselves are just some of the symptoms of a deep sickness in our species. The cruel irony is that we hold our fate in our own hands. We are savior and executioner at the same time.

Psychological professionals can become just as addicted to prescription medications and the medical model as any consumer. I am convinced that if more members of my profession believed in the value of both engaging in their own deep work and critically evaluating their educational materials and their teachers, they could become valuable to their clients again instead of continuing to blindly swallow their textbooks and diagnostic manuals whole or lazily copying the beliefs and practices of their teachers. The blind must stop leading the blind into addiction to medications. The first step is to feel some humility in our perspective on ourselves and the people who work with us. I have experienced times in my life when, if a person in authority over me holding the views currently dominating the field of mental health had  seen or heard me, I could have been labeled/considered mentally ill and possibly forcibly drugged or hospitalized. In fact, as a teenager, I used to have nightmares about saying the wrong thing to a legal authority or to my parents or to anybody who had authority over me. These were very scary dreams. I still often feel as though I am swimming upstream, knowing that most other people think I am too sensitive, too intense, or simply simply too much for the confines of a given situation. I have simply been lucky. I have escaped hospitalization, shock, and all the horrible traumatic things that the mental health system still offers as treatments. I was simply lucky that I was able to keep quiet at the right time. I know that so many people in this world and in this especially in this room have not been so lucky. Those of you who have suffered these indignities know better than most that the human condition can get overwhelmingly distressing for all of us, suddenly and abruptly. At these points in time, the quality of the response by professionals and nearby others to the person in distress powerfully affects the severity of the trauma and the rate of recovery. In these times of distress, we are desperately looking for the answer which will comfort us in our motional pain. We are looking for some kind of respite from confusion and insecurity, because we often we do not trust our perceptions and we do not want to feel  what we are feeling about ourselves, our family, our world. We grab for some stability and put ourselves in the hands of trusted professionals we assume to know what they doing. Unfortunately, psychological professionals who are only trained in the medical model of mental illness just do not have  adequate training to handle individuals in distress. There is a world of difference in therapeutic effect between saying to a person in psychological distress,”You have an incurable disease. I cannot help you, You are broken and need to live in a hospital or be medicated for the rest of your life;” and ”You are experiencing a temporary period of emotional overwhelm. We all have these periods. You can recover from this.

It is important for professionals to remember that anyone is capable of breaking down slowly or abruptly due to trauma and horrifying circumstances. I do not say this to scare people, but to be real: we can all break down. As professionals, how would we like to be treated in a time of distress? As an object or as a person?

It is possible to recover, return to wellness and then keep going, live your life, and keeping on growing. Growth becomes your choice and you begin self-regulating, managing your psychological health on your own and you are doing it without a drug and eventually without a professional. In my opinion, the best professionals want to put themselves out of business because they want to share their life skills with you, helping you discover them within yourself. If the principles of self-regulation supported by the Full Spectrum Approach became another class in school and along with math, history, and science, children were encouraged to learn how to relate healthily to themselves and others from the beginning, I am convinced that human society would be much less distressed than it is seems to be these days.  Unfortunately, current psychological training based on the medical model of mental illness objectifies and infantilizes us, treating us like a perpetual child. The medical world constantly conveys the message, “You are never going to be able to manage your life on your own. You will always need us and our medications.” At Full Spectrum, we offered hope, saying “With effort and our support, sooner or later you are going to be able to handle periods of distress on your own…even extreme distress. I believe in you and I care enough about you to help you get there, but I cannot get you there by myself. You have to want to work, you have to want to put in the time and you will often feel pretty miserable along the way. But…you do not have to stay stuck in the misery and you do not have to suppress or dampen both your joy and sadness with either the drugs or the feeling of hopelessness prescribed by the medical model of mental illness. That does not have to happen anymore.”

It is important to understand that my view of recovery is not simply reducing or avoiding the use of medications. That may be the first step for many people already suffering from an addiction to drugs prescribed them by the medical drug dealers in my profession. The work is building the skills to successfully handle the frustrations, anger, and sadness which medications and internal resistance suppress so well. Whether or not medication is an issue in an individuals life, it seems that internal resistance to feeling the difficult emotions involved in psychological distress is always present. I never take people off their medications, people reduce them themselves with my help and my expertise as they begin to  feel empowered to manage their own recovery.  It is necessary for each person to feel empowered, to very slowly reduce their medications while building the skills to handle the suppressed emotions, feelings, and bodily sensations that will come up as the medication no longer anaesthetizes them to their to inner state of distress. Whether or not medication is present, the same process happens as the fear of feeling our own distress dissolves into a willingness to challenge ourselves at the edge of our comfort zone. At this point, we begin to realize that only by feeling our distress, slowly so as not to overwhelm or retraumatize us, can we face our problems and pass through them.

The wonderful thing is to see how people come alive as they reduce their levels of medication and/or inner resistance. Some people could barely speak or walk when they arrived at Full Spectrum. These people are almost always overloaded with medication. After deciding to skip the Haldol patch he had worn every day for twenty years, one man said to me, “I can actually read now! I used to really love reading but since going on medication, I could not physically or mentally do it. I could not remember the last sentence and the words often feel of the page. Now, I can actually concentrate on a page and understand it!” It is just beautiful for me to see when someone says, “I now know that don’t have to feel like this all the time; all fuzzy and stupid. I’m not stupid. I’m smart. It’s the drugs that are stupid”.

A foundational principle of the Full Spectrum approach is a belief in treating those in mental distress as human beings, in transition from distress to health, instead of defective, broken objects needing medical attention. In my training as a psychologist I was taught to objectify people in human distress and objectify myself as well, treating myself and my profession as simply an instrument, without feelings or subjective opinions. This insistence on objectification stems partly from the objectifying nature of the methods of research used to generate the psychological “facts” which have so much power over so many people’s lives today. The medical model of mental illness, which is supported by still unproven assumptions concerning genetic and biological roots of psychological distress, was generated by research methods used in physical science for centuries. The same research tools used to describe the characteristics of physical objects such as a rock, an ocean, or a bus are used to describe the characteristics of human experiences such as anger, joy, depression, or schizophrenia. When research subjects are treated like objects, or at best, rats, it is no wonder that mental health education built on such research creates professionals who objectify their clients and encourage them to themselves as objects

My professional and personal experience with psychological distress is that with proper support and a willingness to engage in the difficult work necessary for recovery, psychotropic medications and the serious health risks associated with their use become unnecessary. Hopefully, we will look back on the reliance on medications as simply another step in the evolution of an increased understanding of mental health. Hopefully, we will look back and say, “We used to believe psychological distress was an incurable disease. We also used to believe that bloodletting, leeches, solitary confinement, straight jackets, lobotomy, electroshock, insulin coma, tobacco-smoke enema machines, and medications were the best ways to treat people n psychological distress. Now we use a more successful, less damaging approach. We now know that even medications are not necessary with proper care and proper attitude towards people in psychological distress.”

Medications seem necessary now to most professionals and those in distress. This is due to a lack of acceptance of research and information concerning their dangers and ineffectiveness.  It is also due to resistance in the media and the mental health field towards considering a different approach towards psychological distress such as the one I am presenting here today. If the perspective which permeates the Full Spectrum approach were to have as much exposure and money at its disposal as the prevailing medical model has due to its support by the medical-pharmaceutical industry, I am positive that a global shift in attitude away from the current medical model will occur much more quickly.

I am in the process of finishing a book which describes the development of the Full Spectrum Approach and expands on issues brought up on this blog.  This blog is new and I want it not only to share my own knowledge and experience concerning psychological issues and the future of our species, but also the knowledge and experience of the many people in this world who have vital information to add to this topic. to this end, I urge all of you to send me comments, stories, and whatever information you possess through your unique experience in this world.

This book, currently seeking a publishing home, also tells the tale of the verbal and physical abuse I have suffered at the hands of teachers, colleagues, and many other people I have encountered who have blindly swallowed whole the biases and assumptions contained in their education and the powerful messages spread by the billions of dollars spent on psycho-pharmaceutical advertising. Entitled, Kicking the Habit: Helping Psychiatry Ends its Addiction to Prescription Medications, it uses the central characters of the wizard in the Wizard of Oz and the emperor in the The Emperor’s New clothes to describe the unhealthy character of psychiatry, the ruler of the kingdom of psychology and a powerful influence on global definitions of sanity and acceptable social control. This book describes the deceptive, delusional way that emperor Psychiatry convinces himself and our society that his theories, practices, and products, especially prescription medications are necessary and effective. Hopefully, Kicking the Habit will find its way into your hands soon.

As a positive measure to balance the somewhat gloomy nature of previous words, I would like to present my approach to recovering from psychological distress: The Full Spectrum Approach to Psychological Health. This positive approach focuses on both body and mind by integrating psychotherapy, movement and meditation, exercise and organic nutrition, and social activism. It does not rely on medications or the pathological and incorrect diagnoses contained in the DSM. It is founded on my personal and professional experience that recovery from all psychological distress, even severe distress such as psychosis, chronic anxiety and depression, and chronic addiction, is possible without medications and eventually without the support of psychological professionals.

I put this approach into practice at Full Spectrum, the intensive outpatient therapeutic environment I created in San Francisco in 2004. Unfortunately, due to several issues including strong resistance in the field to its innovative approach to psychological distress, Full Spectrum has had to close due to a lack of consistent funding. Hopefully, some day soon, I will be able to reopen and further develop my approach by adding a residential component. Anyone won the lottery lately? In the meantime, I am waiting to find investors in the next stage of Full Spectrum or a job in a clinic amenable to my positive perspective on psychological health.  I call it looking for two invisible needles in an invisible haystack.

Simply stated, my definition of recovery is the following: recovery is a state of belief that anyone can return from any level of psychological distress, even severe distress, and live a satisfying and fulfilling life.  Everyone has the potential to live happily relying on their own innate abilities to both heal themselves from distress and maintain their own health. This is the foundation of hope and strength I stand on personally and professionally. This foundation of belief has helped many people and as well as myself to levels of recovery from severe psychological distress that are not believed to be possible by most people, including virtually all mental health professionals. I invite you to open your mind and your heart to the possibility that full recovery as I define it is possible and that everybody can enjoy a life of self- confidence, self-regulation, and self-reliance.

I have found that people experiencing psychological distress, even extreme distress, such as psychosis, schizophrenia, chronic anxiety, depression, and chronic addiction really do know the causes and solutions to their distress on a deep level and simply need support to develop their ability to access that knowledge and then implement it. We are all truly unique and each of us therefore has a unique recipe for recovery. At Full Spectrum, we helped people connect with the sources of their distress and then assisted them in teaching themselves how to unravel their own predicament. Each person designed his or her own program within the programs offered at Full Spectrum. Participation in each program, activity, and session was completely voluntary. We offered individual and group support, We offered two day treatment programs, one for adults and one for adolescents. Five days a week, five groups a day. Group members were encouraged to come as often as they could tolerate or were willing to come. Freedom of choice is the foundation of the empowering effect of the Full Spectrum Approach and an important component of lasting recovery.

I am a recovering clinical psychologist. By this, I mean I am still recovering from both the psychological distress of my traumatic childhood and the abuse I have experienced from many members of my profession due to my inability to keep quiet concerning the serious dangers and limitations of current psychological theory and practice. Today, I am going to present to you a successful non-pathological therapeutic approach, The Full spectrum approach to Psychological Health, and give you some information which challenges the use of prescription medications as a valid treatment option for psychological distress.  For me, the use of medications and the medical model which supports their use is both a serious issue  affecting the health of anyone in psychological distress and a serious social issue affecting the health of the human species.

Unfortunately, we live in a world in which at any time, any of us can be legally locked into a hospital, physically restrained,  drugged for the rest of our life against our will, and kept there indefinitely simply on the opinion of a psychological professional. Over and above the fact that these drugs impair more than improve our health, we need to demand a radical change of the entire mental health system on political and social grounds.

Today, we do not even have to be in psychological distress to be ensnared by this system. All we need to do is find ourselves in the presence of an authority: a single psychological professional, a member of the police or school system, or even a parent or guardian who decides that we are “mentally ill.” Although this issue is carefully ignored by the media, forced hospitalization and forced medication of people in psychological distress is a common occurrence. And I have not even begun to talk about the millions of people who are forced to take these toxic medications simply because they are not offered any other option.

As a result of an increase in the visibility of published information on the origins of the field of psychiatry, a growing number of psychological professionals, parents, and survivors of current psychiatric treatments have discovered that long-accepted biological and genetic definitions of mental distress have been developed from over a century of assumptions, biased thinking, and flawed research. These theories, still believed as facts by most people in the world, besides leading to dangerous and ineffective treatments, can end our freedom in an instant. While these theories are not supported by valid scientific research, ignorance of their unproven nature allows the continued control over the lives of those of us who at times upset, scare, or just overwhelm those around us. Although we are usually made to feel that we are the problem in these situations, the problem is often due to limitations in those around us, not a limitation within us.

Sadly, I know too many people, especially those of us involved in the consumer movement, who have much, much too much experience with the cruelties and ineffective treatments which are prescribed for people suffering from psychological distress. I have met so many people who, having put their faith in psychiatric thought and practice, have experienced not only no improvement in their lives, but suffered added physical and emotional distress as a result of their prescribed treatments. In addition to the many debilitating physical effects commonly caused by prescribed psychiatric treatments, I have found that the repeated failure of psychiatric methods often creates layers of extra depression which sits like an iron burden on top of whatever personal trauma resulted in the prescription of these dangerous and ineffective treatments in the first place. Even those who sincerely wish to discontinue their prescribed psychiatric treatments are still caught clinging to their belief in the medical model of mental illness. Their denial of their own experience of the ineffectiveness of psychiatric theories and treatments is rooted in their very understandable belief that if psychiatrists, the supposed experts, have not been able to help them, they are either too defective and too broken to ever recover or it is their fault for resisting their psychiatric treatment. Usually, one or both of these beliefs have been encouraged either directly by those who use the medical model to shift blame for failure away from themselves or indirectly by the depressing diagnoses of the medical model. My initial work with most individuals and groups is to invite them to consider that it is psychiatric theory and practice which is defective, broken, and resistant to change, not them.

In my review of the literature, I have found no studies specifically rooted in the actual experience of those most affected by its use. Instead, I have discovered that the only research perspective used for describing the effects of Prozac employs the classic quantitative methods created by physical science and adopted uncritically by psychological research at its inception. These methods use instruments and data analysis techniques rooted in principles originally designed to explore the nature and behavior of matter obeying physical laws assumed to be universal and unchanging. As later posts will discuss, these methods of psychological research do not provide the best data to adequately describe such intangible and shifting phenomena as human psychological experience. However, using a qualitative, yet no less scientifically rigorous method, I have captured, as much as possible, a fuller and much more revealing description of the experience of living under the influence of Prozac.

My purpose is to offer the following information as an expansion of both the discussion of the safety and efficacy of fluoxetine and other psychiatric drugs as well as the acceptance of the biochemical theory of mental illness which supports their use. This discussion is currently dominated by material generated either by pharmaceutical drug companies or by psychological professionals who support the use of psychiatric drugs and believe in the validity of various theories which support their existence. Many of these professionals may hold these beliefs due to a lack of exposure to dissenting information. While this work provides information on both sides of the discussion, the original contribution to the field presented in this work is rooted in particular information which provides support for an alternative view disputing claims of safety and efficacy of antidepressant drugs such as fluoxetine and psychiatric drugs in general.

I have chosen fluoxetine/Prozac as the focus of this work because of its widespread acceptance and use. Fluoxetine is the most prescribed psychiatric chemical compound to date. A core endeavor of this blog is to provide any potential user with as unbiased a description as possible of the experience of living with the effects of this popular drug. As later posts on the nature of scientifc research will discuss, one of my beliefs is a belief in the impossibility of complete objectivity in research. However, the particular methodology employed in the following study pays specific attention to issues of bias and assumption inherent in theoretical orientations and clinical research. This attention separates the research method I use from quantitative methods which both assume the theoretical possibility of complete objectivity as well as rarely take adequate steps to ensure a minimum of researcher bias in their clinical studies. By addressing both these issues as well as consciously acknowledging my personal bias against psychiatric drug use, I hope to contribute to the field of psychology by furnishing more honest, accurate information on this subject. By providing a balance to currently dominating, bias-laden beliefs in the safety and efficacy of fluoxetine and other psychiatric drugs. Much of the data contained in the following chapters will be new information to most and will hopefully result in more informed decisions made by both prescribers and those for whom the prescriptions are written.

The Genesis of Psychopharmacology:

Pre-Chlorpromazine

The first chemical compound to be used as the sole means of affecting psychiatric illness was chlorpromazine.(Deniker and Delay,1983).

Chlorpromazine(CPZ) has the distinction of being the first drug to seem to achieve marked success with people labeled as psychotic by the psychiatric community. While its safety and efficacy are debatable (Breggin 1990), there is no doubt that CPZ achieved rapid market success, thereby engendering concerted interest on the part of pharmaceutical companies in funding psychopharmacological research. However, the quick acceptance of CPZ rested on a foundation of preceding endorsements of other chemical compounds used on psychiatric patients. In turn, the current popularity of drugs such as fluoxetine rests on the acceptance of CPZ in the early 1950′s and success of future psychiatric drugs will be supported by the rapid acceptance of fluoxetine by professionals and the public today.

Many attempts at chemically altering mood and behavior were made before the introduction of the psychiatric use of CPZ began an explosion of pharmaceutical research into psychopharmacology that transformed the field of psychiatry forever. Before the pharmacology industry became interested in psychology as a potential market, many substances had been introduced as treatments into the bodies of mental patients by clinicians hoping to affect what seemed like intractable cases of mental illness. Shorter (1997) recounts various chapters of physical interventions in psychiatry in the nineteenth and early twentieth century employing such methods as infection with malaria to induce fevers, purging with laxatives, four and five-day long periods of bromide-induced sleep, barbitiuate therapy, and sedation with alkaloids like opium and morphine. Shorter writes:

Administering laxatives to the mentally ill on the assumption  that toxins bottled up in the colon were making them insane, reached back to the Middle Ages…Indeed, laxative”cures”of mental illness would remain a constant theme in psychiatry throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.(p.196)

]]> http://www.fullspectrumcenter.org/blog/2010/04/a-brief-history-of-drug-use-in-psychiatry-2/feed/ 0