NAMI parent’s false hope: blindly disabling children for life — by Ty Colbert PhD

This is an old article that was reprinted…we know now that 75% of NAMI funding comes from pharma.

By Ty Colbert Ph.D with his permission to reprint. This is copyrighted material.

A critical but profoundly compassionate look at NAMI families.

NAMI PARENTS’ FALSE HOPE
Blindly Disabling Children for Life*

NAMI, or the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, is primarily a parent support organization. It is a grassroots, self-help, support and advocacy group open to people with “serious mental illnesses,” their families, and their friends. NAMI originated in 1978 when two mothers of “mentally ill” children joined forces. The organization now has more than 200,000 members.

Even though these members (parents) are dedicated to helping their children, because they have been falsely convinced that mental illness is a biological disorder, they are blindly helping to disable their children, many for life. This booklet has been written to expose this tragedy that has affected hundreds of thousands of young individuals and their families.

For a few years I have been involved in NAMI at several different levels. I have attended local and state conferences. I have developed friendships with NAMI parents, and I recently completed NAMI’s twelve-week The Keys to Understanding: Family to Family Educational Program. In this program the parents of children diagnosed primarily with schizophrenia, manic-depression, and schizoaffective disorder study together in a closed group. The program is lead by two trained NAMI parents. It is highly structured from week to week, with a combination of teaching and sharing. By the end of the twelve weeks (30 hours), intimate personal connections have been established between participants. I was there, not as the parent of a mentally ill relative, but to observe the program.

My experiences with NAMI are illustrative of the confusion surrounding drug therapy and the biological model of mental illness.

Bad Parents?
One of the issues that I need to clear up first is the issue of bad parenting. In the past, as well as the present, abusive parents have often been associated with causing mental illness in their children. In fact the term
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* Please note:
All names used in this booklet are pseudo names and some of the details of the biographies have been changed to help guarantee confidentiality where needed.
This booklet recommends that psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, can often be treated without drugs. Nevertheless, it can be extremely dangerous to stop medication without proper assistance or to treat severe emotional conditions without individuals experienced in such manners.

“schizophrenogentic mother” was coined in attempts to explain crazy making kinds of communication patterns that were often found to be associated with schizophrenic children and their mothers.

NAMI members have rebelled against this concept often quite fiercely. NAMI literature is replete with the following statement:

Our children are not mentally ill because we are bad parents.
They are mentally ill because of their brain chemistry.

Since I am claiming that brain chemistry or ones biology is not the root cause of mental illness, does that mean I am blaming parents? For the most part, no, although I have known and treated clients whose “mentally ill” behavior could definitely be attributed to the abuse suffered through their parents. On the contrary, I would characterize every single NAMI parent I have met so far as caring, loving, supportive, and dedicated to his or her children. NAMI parents are open, honest, and giving and are often very popular with their children’s peers. Their homes are the ones often open to others–homes where kids hang out, have fun, and feel properly affirmed.

I have no doubt that some parents who are a part of NAMI have abused their children, or that their children have been severely abused by others; but I am certain that this characterization is not applicable to the parents I have met in NAMI. This is what makes it possible for me to exemplify their cases with respect to the controversy that surrounds drug therapy and the biological model. I will start with one of the couples I know the best and for whom I have the deepest respect.

A Typical Example

Ralph and Susan (pseudonyms) are the first NAMI parents I met. I would have to look very hard to find fault with them. They have dedicated their lives to helping their “mentally ill” son and others. Besides presiding over the local NAMI chapter, Ralph has served on the Board of Directors for one of the largest state mental hospitals in the area. He was personally responsible for successfully transferring a “patient” to another state where he could receive better care. Ralph and Susan have been interviewed live on a radio program that is listened to by millions. So what happened?

Their son, Gary, excelled in high school and was one of the most popular students. He also was a sensitive child who loved his parents deeply and felt very close to them. He was captain of the basketball team and most valuable player his senior year, and “played his heart out” hoping for a scholarship. During the summer after his senior year, his whole life seemed on hold as he nervously waited for notice of a scholarship. It was difficult for a person who had always worked hard and been able to achieve to now simply wait.

Shortly after finding out that he would not receive the scholarship, he began to complain that his head was hurting and that he was having thoughts of suicide. After meeting with his pastor and a general practitioner, he was sent for treatment to a local teaching university specializing in the field of psychiatry.

After running a series of tests and finding nothing wrong with Gary, they sent him home. At first Gary felt better but gradually he became increasingly agitated. Soon he began to experience some loss of reality. For example, he felt that a local storm that did some damage was his fault or that he had somehow caused it.

As a result he was sent back to the same hospital where he was now diagnosed as schizophrenic and started on medication. At that time the doctor told the parents not to become too encouraged about their son’s recovery. Gary was given advice from the doctor, such as how to exercise and eat right. Gary’s mother said he ran his heart out following the doctor’s suggestions, trying to get better. Obviously, he was desperate for some help.

Three months later he was back in the hospital, mainly as a result of his hallucinations that were beginning to dominate him more and more. The next twenty-five years of his life have been spent in and out of different hospitals. Although he has been “stabilized” on different and newer drugs, his condition has only become worse with each passing year.

Although Gary was subjected to the best testing possible at a major teaching hospital, nothing was found wrong with his brain. The real truth was that Gary felt crushed when he received the scholarship rejection notice. He felt so emotionally overloaded with the pain that he did not know how to handle it. Obviously, the fact that he had never (or seldom) failed before and had grown up in a very secure home in part resulted in these new emotions feeling very strong and powerful to him. His paranoid thoughts and hallucinations were his mind’s way of trying to deal with all this pain. In fact, it’s likely that he might have felt so bad inside from his failure that he experienced an enormous need to be punished. If he felt punished, he might then have been able to begin to forgive himself. Believing that he had caused a flood, or that he was hearing voices telling him that he was bad and needed to be punished was his mind’s best way of dealing with the pain.

Actually, I am only making an educated guess here. By the time I had a chance to meet Gary, he had already been drugged for 25 years. At this point it was almost impossible for him to retrieve the true meaning of his pain or the smaller details of when his emotional problems started.

Yet I truly believe that Gary could have been helped. Instead of simply diagnosing him as schizophrenic and telling him to exercise, an insightful therapist could have helped Gary deal with his strong feelings of failure. In this way, Gary could have successfully worked through his pain and not lost his life to the disabling effects of the drugs.

Because Gary’s parents were loving and caring and wanted to help Gary in any way they could, they became susceptible to the medical model explanation. The fact that the drugs seemed to help at first only pulled them in deeper. Unfortunately, the more Gary regressed from the drugs and repeated hospitalizations, the more hope Ralph and Susan put into the use of medications as their only hope.

The Real Results

To emphasize the disaster that drugs create in people’s lives, let me share one of the most painful sessions in the twelve-week Family To Family Educational Program. The class assignment was for the parents to discuss their most pressing problem. Of the thirteen “patients” represented, only two seemed to be “improving.” Both of them were still on government disability, however, and a goal of true independence did not seem realistic. All the parents of these two individuals were hoping for was continued drug stabilization with longer and longer times between relapses. They prayed that this would lead to a “marginally productive life” for their children. Even though one of them did improve even more and is now functioning on a fairly high level, these are the parents of the two best children out of thirteen.

Ironically, the parents of those two children who were doing the best had been in NAMI for a considerable time and had leadership positions in the organization. After many years of hard work by the parents, many, many disappointments, many different drug applications, and a few near-death experiences, their children had finally been stabilized on the drugs. It is my opinion that the “improvement” was more the result of the dedicated, supportive, and loving parents, not the drugs.

The other eleven children, who had all been under psychiatric care for a number of years, were in terrible shape. They either lived at home or at board-in-care facilities. Some slept all day, some drank, all suffered from very low self-esteem and low motivation, a few often had violent temper tantrums, and almost all were totally dependent on their parents or others. Most of them (maybe all of them) were on government disability, yet many of their parents were still helping them quite a bit financially. Because of this dependency, many held a significant place of control and power over their parents.

The general sequential picture described by these NAMI parents was the following:(l) the child developed some emotional problems, (2) the child was given psychiatric drugs, (3) the child fought against being medicated and experienced relapse, (4) stronger drugs in larger dosages were prescribed, and (5) the child became more and more disabled, often enraged and suicidal.

These children, after years of medication and many power struggles with parents and doctors, after repeatedly being told “You have a biological disorder that is not your fault nor can you do anything about it,” and with some very dedicated parents hanging in there with them, had reached a state of semi-stabilization. This is considered a successful solution.

A Contrasting Case

Before I elaborate more on Gary and other similar NAMI cases, let me contrast these cases with a successful case.

Shawn was also very accomplished and was the most popular student in his high school. He was the starting football quarterback, the starting basketball point guard, and captain of his baseball team. His parents were extremely dedicated to helping kids, and their home was the local hangout. Shawn’s parents opened their home to the kids after every football game, providing free refreshments.

Shortly after graduation, Shawn felt overwhelmed. He was thinking weird thoughts and starting to hear faint voices. His mother took him to a psychiatrist who told them that Shawn was in the first stage of schizophrenia and that he needed to be hospitalized and medicated as soon as possible. Shawn’s parents resisted the idea, but the psychiatrist said he would not treat Shawn if he could hospitalize and medicate him.

This particular psychiatrist is one of the most respected psychiatrists in the area. Because he has been trained to believe in the chemical imbalance model, he, of course, sees only biology and is sure that he is recommending the right steps. Shawn’s parents called me instead and I agreed to treat him.

Shawn, a very sensitive child, tended to be extremely self-critical. Even though he was quite successful as an athlete and very tough on the field, he had always had a fear of hurting other people’s feelings and felt enormous guilt about it. It was extremely hard for him to voice his own concerns. Thus he had dissociated off a lot of shame about how he believed he had hurt others, as well as a lot of anger about how he had been hurt and how others had been hurt.

He also told me that he had felt a “dark spot” inside of him since he was a little child, and that this spot made him doubt his potential or self worth.

I only spent a few sessions with Shawn, so we never did get to the core of this “dark spot.” My guess is that it represented the area where he believed he had hurt people and could not forgive himself. In the time I did spend with him, we worked on this false guilt about hurting others. I explained to him that hurt feelings are a part of every relationship. If you send your child to bed early, you will hurt his feelings.

He also now realized that he had been assuming that his parents had the same lofty expectations of him as he did of himself which, of course, was not true. To date, his high self-expectations had certainly produced successes. But they had now left him in an impossible trap–he couldn’t always be perfect and thereby avoid disappointing others, and he couldn’t achieve for others.

I applied some basic feeling-orientation therapy to his situation. All he needed was a little help understanding his motivations, his feelings, and, especially, his unwarranted and inappropriate guilt. Since then (about four years ago), Shawn has done extremely well socially and psychologically and has graduated from college. He still occasionally struggles with his “false guilt,” but it does not now confuse, consume, or paralyze him. He knows that he is very sensitive and must guard against overreacting.

So the big question here is, “What would have happened if Shawn and his parents had accepted the label of schizophrenia? What if they had accepted that he had a brain defect, along with the psychiatrist’s recommendations that his only “hope” was life-long medication? Since Shawn was already overly sensitive to hurting or disappointing his parents and others, and was already dissociating that pain, we can be quite certain that the brain-disabling drugs would have caused further dissociation from reality. He would have been victimized and unable to care for himself, just as most others in this situation are.

Although the “disease” model may have at first alleviated his guilt, he still would have felt disappointment and failure. He could have rationalized, “Since I didn’t choose to be sick, and since it’s just my chemistry, then it’s not my fault.” But in his heart, fearing a life of disability, non-productivity, and lack of self-expression, he would have to feel disappointed, extremely sorrowful, hopeless, and, yes, quite probably guilty.

Once stabilized on medication at the hospital, he would have been sent back out into the world to face its stresses, still dissociating his pain, and still not understanding his deep confusing feelings. He would be at least somewhat disabled from the medication, and would be faced with having to create a new and marginal life for himself as a “mentally ill” person. This picture is indeed bleak, but it is a true representation of the horrors of even trying to put a life back together after having been labeled mentally ill.

Noncompliance

One of the more difficult challenges on the road to healing for someone like Shawn is noncompliance with the demands of the psychiatric system. If the “condition” is accepted, if the drugs are taken on command, if there is no argument about adjusting the medication upward during periods of regression, then there will be no conflict with the system. But once the person makes a choice for personal healing, recovery, or noncompliance, the psychiatric system–and many times the family–use force to get the person to comply.

If a medicated client chooses to withdraw from the drugs, he must usually do so without support. He must deal not only with his paralyzing fears concerning relapse, but also with the withdrawal effects of the drugs. In addition, he must face the enormity of the task he has undertaken to put his life back together, the social stigma of the label “mentally ill,” and the original pain that got him into this vicious cycle in the first place.

Let me point out here that “relapses” are highly likely because psychosis is often one of the side effects of withdrawing from antipsychotic drugs (Breggin, 1991; Breggin & Cohen, 1999). So, during withdrawal, the task of the subconscious mind is to not only dissociate the original pain and the felt violation of the psychiatric system, but also the emotional pain caused by the withdrawal psychosis.

“Relapse” is a state-of-the-art term medically defined as “the recurrence of a disease or symptoms after apparent recovery” (Thomas, C., 1997). You can see from this definition that once the symptoms disappear with medication, one is deemed to be “in recovery” when, in fact, one is in a drugged state. When the medication is discontinued and the mind begins to work harder to deal with the awareness of the emotional pain and/or the withdrawal effects of the medication, a person is told that he is relapsing into his disease.

It is not difficult to understand this scenario. One is considered a “success case,” i.e., “stabilized” when (l) an “appropriate” label is affixed, (2) the medication is maintained, (3) the symptoms are “relieved,” (4) government disability payments are in place, and (5) one is living in a board-and-care home. Any relapse whatsoever is attributed to “the wrong combination of drugs and/or appropriate dosages not yet having been established.”

Such a procedure would soon leave most of us deeply confused. Add to this the process of forced hospitalization, forced drugging, and the use of restraints, and you can see that those who survive by becoming a part of the system, do so by giving over their “soul” to the system, to a large degree.

A Comparison of Therapeutic Processes

You might be saying to yourself, “It is impossible for Dr. Colbert to predict what would have happened to Shawn had he been hospitalized and medicated.” Be aware that I am justifying my comparisons, comments, and hypotheticals based on my twenty years of counseling experience, my experiences with the NAMI families, and a lifetime of interdiction on behalf of my clients to prevent these very outcomes we are discussing. To help bring further clarity to these issues, the following is a diagram of the two different scenarios.

The non-biological approach

The biological approach

Biopsychiatry’s repeated mistake is in convincing parents that their child’s out-of-the-ordinary feelings, behavior, or thoughts are rooted in a defective brain, a chemical imbalance, and can only be corrected with drugs. Instead of devoting the requisite time to exame the meaning of the pain, thereby “making sense” of the symptoms, the pain is drugged, numbed, blunted, and disabled.

As the symptoms continue and exacerbate, and relapses occur over and over again, parents are split between who or what to blame: “Is it my fault?” or “Is it a chemical imbalance?” Lamentably, everyone involved surrenders to the chemical imbalance model once the diagnosis and the life-long remedy (drugs) is accepted.

Let’s now look at another NAMI kid, Jerry, to solidify these points.

Jerry

Jerry grew up with religious yet affirming parents. His parents, the church, and his private school presented a Christian view of sex, yet there is little evidence that he was inappropriately shamed in this area. Once he reached puberty, though, he began to lust and masturbate, and felt “very bad” about these thoughts and his behavior. Like most kids, he never shared these guilt feelings with his parents. He attempted to overcome or suppress the guilt, shame, and disappointment by assiduously seeking perfection in the eyes of God and his family. As a result, he too excelled in high school athletics and academics and became student body president.

During six years of junior-high and senior-high excellence, he continued to feel guilty, shameful, and disappointed about his sexual “problem.”  Finally, he reached his threshold, becoming emotionally overloaded. When he could no longer dissociate from these strong feelings in a socially acceptable way, he had a “psychotic break” and began to manifest extreme hatred, rage, and resentment against his parents and God, and to view himself as “a famous person.” He also heard a voice that acknowledged this “famous person.”

Because Jerry’s behavior appeared very suddenly and seemed quite bizarre to his parents and to the professional from whom they originally sought help, it was easy to convince all parties involved that a chemical imbalance or some other biological defect was present. But this sudden change in behavior was not due to some illusory “chemical imbalance”; it was due to the eruption of buried layers of shame, guilt, and anger that could no longer be suppressed by “ordinary, acceptable” means.

What actually happened was that Jerry’s subconscious mind came to his rescue to reverse the shaming process, first by creating hate toward his parents and God, and then by creating a new view of himself. The hate offered relief because he could then direct the self-shaming energy outward. This hate then caused him additional shame and guilt for now feeling negative about his parents and God.

The only way out of this mounting anger/shame trap was to create more anger and less shame. To help give him permission to validate his anger, as well as himself, he also began to fanaticize himself as successful and famous. Thus, even though his mind was trying its creative best to manage his emotional pain, a point came when the energy of that unhealed pain could not be contained any more. The hurting soul needed desperately to express itself and the result was a sudden eruption of emotions and behaviors.

Even though it appeared that his psychotic behavior came out of nowhere, as in the majority of cases the buildup had actually been taking place for years. Because he too was a very sensitive, perfectionistic person, the buildup probably started on a very small scale in his childhood.

Due to all of Jerry’s success in junior-high and high school, there was enough “external okayness” to keep his emotional system in place. Once he graduated, though, and had to do without this external acknowledgment, he collapsed into a so-called psychotic break.

Actually the term “psychotic break” is misleading. Even though it means a break from reality, it also implies that something might be broken internally. Although it does not appear to be the case, however, the mind is actually functioning very creatively to protect the soul or self at such a moment. So these behaviors are more an “emotional fix” than a “psychotic break.” The mind, in a state of emotional overload, is working the best way in which it knows how.

I have “ridden through” several so-called psychotic breaks with clients and have learned that what these individuals needed most was someone whom they could trust to simply be with them. Their emotional state is not really any different than that of a parent or spouse who suddenly finds out that their child or spouse has been killed. They break down emotionally, and what they need most is to simply be held and heard.

So-called psychotic breaks are enormously frightening and isolating when no one is there emotionally for support because others are afraid of the situation. If the break occurs subsequent to repeated drugging and withdrawal, a person must also contend with the added hate and the toxic psychosis that occurs as a result of withdrawing from the drugs.

Jerry’s break came as the result of years of shame and anger that were not relieved by his various dissociative techniques: keeping his mind busy with high school activities, praying over and over for forgiveness, making a commitment over and over never to lust again, rationalizing that he was okay because he was forgiven by Christ, binge eating junk food, and being angry with God and his parents because they were not some how making his dilemma go away. Again, all these ways of dissociating his pain worked for a number of years, but because there was no healing or true understanding of his pain, he soon became an “emotional wreck.”

When he could not contain this negative energy anymore and the “break” occurred, the powerful disabling antipsychotic drugs appeared to “help” because they engendered “disinterest” and “apathy” toward his own life–they numbed his pain. He also felt exonerated from his sins and perhaps felt some relief about how he viewed himself because he could blame his behaviors on a “chemical imbalance.” Both his parents and the psychiatrist were pleased that the drugs were “working.”

Jerry was 28 years old when he “woke up” one day and realized that ten years had passed him by. During that time he had been medicated with one drug after another to keep his painful feelings in check. Now at 28 instead of 18, he looked back and realized that he had wasted those years and that his life was slipping by.

It was at this time that Jerry contacted me and asked for help. He had dangerously withdrawn from the medication on his own, but was still struggling with his shame. In addition to his sexual shame, which he had effectively dealt with on his own, he now was dealing with the shame and anger of wasting ten years of his life and making a few more major mistakes.

Yet as hard as he is struggling to reclaim his life, his self-confidence, and his dignity, he is a most fortunate NAMI-Kid because he is finding his way out. He now understands how he got to his present state, the fallacies of the chemical imbalance model, the terrible disabling affect of the drugs he took, and the support that he now needs. He is well aware that it is his responsibility to put his life back together, and he is also aware of how to reach out for proper help.

Strong Precipitating Events

Some individuals who suffer from “mental illness” were drastically abused as children and subjected to an overload of emotional pain. Consequently, it often does not take much of a precipitating event in their teens or early adulthood to produce the symptoms used to diagnose someone as mentally ill.

With those who did not grow up in highly dysfunctional homes, the pattern is somewhat different. The emotional buildup is usually gradual and often the result of how the person puts pressure on herself. Since this emotional buildup happens bit by bit, it often only approaches an overload point when a major precipitating event suddenly occurs. Such an event can be as simple as the breakup of a love affair. This sudden extra emotional pain, on top of that which has already accumulated, pushes the protective part of the subconscious to the breaking point.

Evidence of how these strong precipitating events work became most obvious to me during one of the “Family To Family” meetings that I attended. At the meeting, the parents were asked to share what was going on in their lives just before their children were diagnosed as mentally ill. Here is a complete list in the order given. I did not omit any case. Of the nine children represented that evening, all had been severely traumatized just prior to their diagnosis.

Parent #1: The daughter showed some signs of depression in high school but they were slight. At the age of 20, she got pregnant with a man a few years older than herself and was married. He abused her so she divorced him. He killed himself leaving a note blaming her.

Parent #2: The daughter’s onset of mental illness occurred shortly after the death of her mother.

Parent #3: Shortly after starting college, the boy’s father died.

Parent #4: The father had been diagnosed as schizophrenic; the mother had to call and have him forcefully hospitalized several times. After repeatedly seeing the police come and handcuff the father, the son started hearing voices coming from the TV.

Parent #5: The boy’s brother, father, and uncle committed suicide. He eventually was diagnosed as manic-depressive.

Parent #6: After a bitter divorce, the child’s father moved across the U.S.

Parent #7: At age three, the boy “personalized” the Kennedy assassination. He remembers believing and fearing he would never have control over his life.

Parent #8: At age fourteen, the girl’s father and mother divorced. The mother remarried and moved back east.

Parent #9: The child had dyslexia when young, and the mother had a very hard time finding help for him. Since the father was a successful professional and the older brother was quite intelligent, the doctors felt that the boy was okay, even though he wasn’t. He described his problems in school as feeling as if he was “walking around on two wooden legs.”  His self-esteem eroded and he began to believe he was God shortly after the breakup with his girlfriend.

With respect to the other case histories I have outlined herein, Jerry’s precipitating event was also a very rough break-up with a girlfriend. Shawn, in the six months prior to his diagnosis, had suffered through the death of his sister and the deaths of two close friends.

It is so very sad to think that these events and the corresponding feelings were not given the highest priority and that this discounting has resulted in years of misery and shattered lives.

Summary

From a collective point of view, some very strong generalizations can be made from the NAMI case histories. For very different reasons, some children accumulate a lot of unresolved emotional pain that may seem initially insignificant. This pain goes unnoticed and un-verbalized and grows like a cancer in the mind of the child. Then a point is reached, gradually or suddenly, when symptoms are manifested.

Since these symptoms have been referred to as “indices of a mental illness due to a chemical imbalance,” these kids are given a psychiatric diagnosis and a mind-disabling drug to silence the symptoms.

Since the pain has been further ignored, and the biopsychiatric system demands a submission to the disease model, a power struggle often ensues. Out of the power struggle between the hurting soul and the psychiatric industry, some “patients” emerge completely drug-free and healed, while others just give up the struggle, submit, and are disabled for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, there is a third very desperate group whose members either take their own lives or end up hurting others (very few violate others).

Let’s not forget the NAMI parents and all parents of the mentally ill. They too are severely wounded during this process. Parents are deeply wounded as they watch their child suffer. Caring so much for their children and worrying daily for that child’s life, parents are told that drugs are the only solution. They become just as dependent on them for hope as do the children. When the drugs fail, and the child relapses, parental love is even more wounded.

When a drugged child stops taking his medication and relapses, the relapse is always blamed on the child’s failure to take the drug. In other words, the drugs are never viewed as the problem but only as the solution. It is not usually considered that the child wants off the drugs because of the terrible side effects of the drugs, or that he feels controlled by the drugs, or that the child in his internal wisdom knows the drugs are not helping but hindering, or that the child’s emotional woundedness is crying out to be heard. It is seldom considered that the child may not be relapsing but may be experiencing the withdrawal effects of the drugs. It is never considered that maybe the reason the child is trying to take his life is, in part, because the drugs are not working. It is not considered that his or her suicidal behavior is the result of the deep-seated desperation that is particularly sealed from proper expression by the drugs themselves. No! The whole scenario is reduced to a chemical imbalance that has never been found, that a drug has never cured, and that does not exist.

The parents become more and more trapped between feeling guilty and suffering deeply from the pain their child is going through. In fact, the more caring the parents, the more suffering they experience and the more trapped they feel. That’s why NAMI is flush with caring parents who pour thousands of hours and millions of dollars into NAMI supported programs and research. To perpetuate the damaging chemical imbalance myth, the pharmaceutical companies donate millions of dollars to organizations such as NAMI and to the salaries of the psychiatrists who support the chemical imbalance model.

The hope of all NAMI parents focuses on the magic of drugs. As painful as it may be to admit, the pharmaceutical companies, the researchers, and most of the psychiatric community now make their living engendering this false hope, damaging the lives and minds of these helpless, hurting individuals.