It is always sunrise somewhere…
This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. - John Muir
Morning dew on dill
Out of our minds: learning to be creative
Sir Ken Robinson speaks to societal issues of great importance that in turn effect everyone’s mental health whether the connection is made explicitly of not.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson will ask how do we make change happen in education and how do we make it last?
I posted a shorter video that is narrated by Sir Ken Robinson a while back. It’s actually a small piece of this longer lecture. If you’re not up to listening to close to an hour above you might want to check it out.
In the excerpt I posted last time he links the issues with education with the problem of drugging children (with psychiatric meds): Changing Education Paradigms
A book by Ken Robinson:
Trying to reverse 2 years of hell with a shot in the neck (take note, those interested in PTSD and/or withdrawal syndromes)
Today is my two-year anniversary of having completed the withdrawal from 6 psychiatric drugs in 6 years. It also happens to be my 47th birthday. It feels like the last 8 years have just disappeared on me. It’s rather surreal.
I wish I could say I’d recovered from the iatrogenesis and protracted withdrawal syndrome, but I have not. I’m still very ill. I continue to learn how to Live Well While Being Sick. I have no other choice. Illness and isolation both can be teachers. Dark phases of our lives are often the richest source of insight. I still would like it to be done with. Yes.
I don’t want to reflect so much on my 2-year anniversary today as I’m still recovering from the disappointment of the last week. I’ve been sick for a very long time (far longer than the amount of time I’ve been free of psych drugs) and sometimes it’s best not to dwell on it too much.
I had hoped that perhaps today I’d be sharing good news. Last week, I went out-of-state for a special medical procedure being looked at for PTSD that might reduce my symptoms. It didn’t work out quite like I had hoped. Still, I’m sharing what I did because I think that for some people, especially people with PTSD who are not suffering also from gross drug withdrawal damage, the procedure I had might help a lot.
I will be sharing emails and other communications I had about this procedure to communicate about this in this post today.
In part what is wrong with us who have protracted withdrawal syndromes is autonomic dysfunction. Very systemic and broad dysfunction that is chemically induced by the drugs. PTSD, the more typical sort, that is incurred by warfare, trauma etc, is also a sort of autonomic dysfunction, conditioned by experiences.
Withdrawal syndrome seems to go beyond this, but part of it essentially affects the same part of the brain and is marked by hyper-vigilance and heart palpitations etc. I’ve not been able to live with my husband for over 2 years now because I can’t deal with unexpected noises in the house. They throw me into an increased panic–the hyper-vigilance pretty much never stops. He lives downstairs and I live upstairs. It’s pretty damn severe.
Those of us with psychiatric drug withdrawal syndromes are a bit different in that we have it by chemical insult and the people with PTSD described below have it from more easily understood trauma, but I’ve consulted with doctors who understand both withdrawal and PTSD and they are convinced it’s the same part of the brain that has gone haywire. And in fact withdrawal can be very traumatic so I think it’s safe to assume that it is in part classic PTSD as well.
The procedure involves an injection of a temporary anesthetic at the stellate ganglion on the right side of the neck. This is a kind of nerve junction in the sympathetic nervous system involved in the fight-flight response. The injection, called a stellate ganglion block, has been used for decades treating chronic pain conditions such as complex regional pain syndrome.
After the procedure I was free from the hyper-vigilance etc for 4 days. Most people with PTSD need the procedure twice and usually don’t lose the effect of the first one for several months and some people don’t need a second injection at all. The people treated have apparently so far not needed it more than two times. [Read More...]
A harrowing odyssey of Effexor…entry into the system, withdrawal and recovery
This is a popular archival page, I’m reposting here today. I can see by the stats on the blog that sometimes people happen upon one of these posts via search and then they sit and click through one after another until they’ve read the whole thing! I’ve noticed this a few times now and I don’t really look at my stats all that closely most of the time, so I imagine it happens with some frequency. People get glued to their computer for a few hours! It’s a compelling story and so I’m sharing it again.
Keener is now a long-time blogging friend. We actually met way back when I first started blogging almost 5 years ago now. Her and her friend’s blog was/is predominantly about gardening but Keener had this side story that she worked on over time with multiple posts. I’ve been given permission to reprint it as well as publish the final chapters for the first time. It’s a downright odyssey in how she explains being sucked into psychiatry and ultimately how she escapes. The story as suggested with the title of this tab centers around a radically awful adverse reaction to Effexor.
She tells the harrowing tale with a great sense of humor!
It’s really a short autobiographical novel of sorts in parts.
Chapter 13 Finally the happy ending comes
For information on safer withdrawal vist: Withdrawal 101
New video: Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs: A Harm Reduction Approach | Will Hall
Disturbing stats on BIG PHARMA
Thought I’d repost this. It’s a rather fun look at the atrocity that is pharma.
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Source: Online Colleges and Universities
Let your tears come. Let them flow, flood, storm, shake and wake you….
Let your tears come. Let them flow, flood, storm, shake and wake you. Let your whole body cry, weep, sob. Drop below any shame you might have about crying so openly, letting your heart break, knowing that what is breaking is not your heart, but only the energetic encasing around it. If you feel like a child or infant as you cry, let it be, keeping your mind out of it. We have so much unattended sadness, so much muted sorrow, so much life-force tied up in keeping our tears, new and old, from fully surfacing. But surface they must, if we are to truly come alive… ~ Robert Augustus Masters
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Wonderful article by Robert Masters on Beyond Meds:
● Don’t give fear a thought (for anyone who ever deals with anxiety or fear)
Books by Masters:
● Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters
● Meeting The Dragon: Ending Our Suffering By Entering Our Pain
● Transformation through Intimacy, Revised Edition: The Journey toward Awakened Monogamy
When you’re ill: how can you ask for help? (chronic illness and protracted withdrawal syndromes)
I’m sharing another one of Toni Bernhard’s, author of How to Be Sick, helpful posts from Psychology Today. In this post she talks about how when one is ill and someone offers to help we often have to, in turn, help them out and let them know what we need. I have, indeed, found this to be true.
I unfortunately can’t agree that everyone who offers to help means it unfortunately. I found that my illness really did a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. There will always be people who cannot deal with illness. Let those people go in peace and try to have compassion for them. They are dealing with their own fears.
But for enough people it’s true and they often need prompting in order to know how to be helpful. It’s worth reaching out and asking people for the help you need if they’ve offered it and then you’ve not heard again. Once you get the hang of it it becomes easier and it’s good to find out we’ve might not been as abandoned as we might have thought.
For me, I’m still sometimes disappointed by the number of people I thought were friends who simply could not abide my illness, but as I move further into the journey I find great joy in those who really are my friends and it’s clear this transition will continue. Some people, too, need time to come around and if we open our hearts to them when they’re ready to come around healing can happen for both them and you.
This is an excerpt of what Toni Bernhard had to say:
Here’s what I’ve learned about people who offer to help:
1. They’re sincere in their offer: they mean it.
2. The responsibility falls on me, not on them, to follow-up.
3. The best way to take them up on their offer is to give them a specific task to do.
Numbers 1 and 2 are consistent with my experience when I was in a position to help others: I meant it but I rarely followed-up, sometimes because I got distracted and sometimes because I thought I might be bothering them.
As for number 3, friends and relatives aren’t mind readers. We need to tell them what to do. read the rest
The key part for me here was discovering it really does help to be specific about a task. And it’s not something we intuitively understand when we are sick and in great need so it’s something we need to practice. Read the rest of Toni’s post which goes into much greater detail with additional suggestions and with an example from her life.
I thought I would use this little post to repost one of my archival tab pages that has more on the subject of how those of us who become chronically ill feel so isolated so frequently. It seems there are stages of acute, chronic illness and acceptance around the isolation we often find ourselves in. I’m still very isolated and much of it is by necessity. I cannot be around people much, it’s draining on my very limited energetic resources.
You will find that if you read all these posts on the topic of isolation that I’ve written that early on I’ve come from a place of dismay and pain and anger too, but much of that has changed now as time passes and I learn how to live this new life that is now mine. It remains difficult but how I understand it has changed significantly.
Some of my early posts take the stance of educating those who are not ill by making suggestions as to how to approach their sick loved ones or friends. Those suggestions are still good, but the fact is when we’re sick (and always) we really cannot change the behavior of others and the best way to change things is by changing ourselves.
So I’ve been working on stopping wishing and hoping that people would be different and now I try to be different. That means reaching out a bit more often rather than waiting for people to come to me. There were times in my illness that that was essentially impossible so the earlier posts are still valid. It would indeed be nice if our friends and loved ones were more proactive in our times of great need. That desire we all have when we are so gravely ill is deeply human and natural. For me if I didn’t have my husband caring for me I would’ve been institutionalized. The fact is we do need people. So go easy on yourself if you’re still in that place and take baby steps to move on through it.
Here is that archive collection that I’ve simply cut and pasted from it’s page:
The isolation and sense of abandonment many people deal with when sick with protracted withdrawal illness.
This is a collection of posts that were all very popular and broadly shared among people in protracted withdrawal illness on community boards. I also still get people writing to me and asking me to remind me where they can find them on the blog. In fact the reason I’m making this page here now is because both yesterday and today two different people wrote to me asking me for the links to these pieces.
I wish isolation and the feeling of abandonment was not so common when we are ill, but it is and it does help to know that we are not alone in this phenomena so I’m sharing the posts I’ve done on the topic here.
There is both validation for those who feel abandoned here and also hope and inspiration that it will pass and we will all be better people after we regain our health and perspective.
● In the near absence of friendship…
● When I think of my relationships I have no regrets
● When Friends Disappear During a Health Crisis
● Living with chronic physical illness, why are we invisible?
More recently I added a post in which I’ve come to have compassion on some of the painful behavior our loved ones show in the face of our illness:
Also in time as our souls heal we can learn to cope better and better with the limitations our bodies still have:
These archives now span close to five years. They are a record of a time in my life when I was learning and transforming at a rate unlike any other time in my life. I say this as a way of disclaimer. In the earlier years of this blog I am processing shock and dismay. In the early years I am undisputedly angry. I have worked out much of that and see things in a much less judgmental manner now. This continues to evolve. I sometimes want to take down old posts because they no longer convey how I feel, but I realize that they may still be helpful to people who are going through something similar now. The journey got me to where I am today, it’s just odd to have some of it in writing here for all to see.
Pharmageddon 2
I did one post on Pharmageddon, David Healy’s new book already. It’s a damning critique of our pharma controlled medical system. It’s worth a second post.
Here I’m quoting 1Boring old man’s, latest post. Mickey is a retired psychiatrist with lots of insight into this profession:
Dr. Healy’s Pharmageddon is one of those books to be read, not summarized. It’s not that it’s filled with new information. He sees what the rest of us see, albeit from the position more interior than most – a neuroscientist who has been embedded in the scene. He writes about the primacy of the pharmaceutical industry, the corruption of academic medicine, the rise of the clinical research industry and the sequestration of their data, the deification of statistics, ghost-writing, etc – the things many of us decry and can’t seem to stop writing about. But what’s different about this book is first that Dr. Healy doesn’t stop with this obvious symptom list, he goes on to generalize these symptoms beyond the boundaries of psychiatry and mental health to the entire domain of modern medicine [and perhaps beyond]. While most of us remain preoccupied with the self-serving greed that lies just under the surface of these symptoms, Dr. Healy rises above [or gets underneath?] the obvious and tells us stories of how former attempts to keep this predictable human force in check in previous times have backfired and lead us to the present – the law of unintended consequences prevails [with a lot of help from a determined industry]. (read the rest)
See David Healy’s page on Pharmagedon here.
You can purchase the book via Amazon here: Pharmageddon
David Healy has also been one of the few MDs who called attention to the phenomena of withdrawal syndromes with antidepressants. That is often how many of us has heard of him. He was aware of many of the issues with psychiatric drugs long before it became more common knowledge. This book seems to go well beyond psychiatric medicine, as it should. Our pharma controlled medical industry is literally killing us. This understanding is something that has yet to filter to the masses.
My favorite blog that confronts medicine in general is The Healthy Skeptic, which now simply goes by his name Chris Kresser. He does a great job of reviewing the medical literature and debunking all sorts of medical practice that has been supported by pharma. And then he actually teaches you how to take care of your body naturally! Solutions…not just criticism. We can learn to doctor ourselves in large part.
David Healy is also the author of: Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression (Medicine, Culture, and History)
Also David Healy has started a blog and website that will collect info from patients harmed by psychiatric drugs. Go check out his new website. This is what we need, MDs and researchers collecting what we’ve been putting out into the blogosphere for years now. Great to see this new development.
Revisiting “normal”
The sobering but oh, so enlightening, words of R.D. Laing revisited:
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.~ R.D. Laing
and
What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.
R. D. Laing, from Politics of Experience
Other books by Laing:
● Selected Works of R.D. Laing
● Mad to Be Normal: Conversations With R.D. Laing
● Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics
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altmentalities
