Bitterness disorder—no f-ing joke!

As far as I’m concerned bitterness, like mourning, is a part of a normal process that needs to be worked through and healed. No doubt hatefully bitter people are miserable and can hurt others and need to figure shit out, but again THIS IS ABOUT PATHOLOGIZING something from the NORMAL RANGE of human experience after something shitty has happened to us.

I’m sure they’d happily label all of us who have been harmed by psychiatry with this disorder as we work out our dismay after realizing we’ve been had. That is what mindfulness and meditation and prayer are for. To heal and forgive that which has been done to us and to forgive ourselves too.

But instead, before you’ll know it they’ll be handing out drugs for being “bitter” now too.

Will it ever end?? This is insanity. And it’s the psychiatrists who enthusiastically listen to this shit that are insane.

From the LA Times:

You know them. I know them. And, increasingly, psychiatrists know them. People who feel they have been wronged by someone and are so bitter they can barely function other than to ruminate about their circumstances.

This behavior is so common — and so deeply destructive — that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder. The behavior was discussed before an enthusiastic audience last week at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn. in San Francisco.
(emphasis mine)
The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge.

“They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It’s one step more complex than anger. They’re angry plus helpless,” says Dr. Michael Linden, a German psychiatrist who named the behavior.

Embittered people are typically good people who have worked hard at something important, such as a job, relationship or activity, Linden says. When something unexpectedly awful happens — they don’t get the promotion, their spouse files for divorce or they fail to make the Olympic team — a profound sense of injustice overtakes them. Instead of dealing with the loss with the help of family and friends, they cannot let go of the feeling of being victimized. Almost immediately after the traumatic event, they become angry, pessimistic, aggressive, hopeless haters. (read the rest)


Discover more from Beyond Meds: Alternatives to Psychiatry

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

23 thoughts on “Bitterness disorder—no f-ing joke!

Add yours

  1. Hi Dwight,

    My father, a healthy man in his mid 50’s, presented with a severe brief onset migraine in 2007. He was misdiagnosed with “late onset bipolar” and put on SSRI’s, Effexor and Prozac. He then had the classic adverse reactions you mention, had several psychotic breakdowns and was put in care for several weeks. This had the effect of destroying his health and his distinguished career as a professor of medicine. Last year he killed himself, a devastating tragedy for my mother and the rest of my family.

    It’s my opinion, like yours, that these drugs are misprescribed and often do much more harm than good. I hope you can find some peace. The most important thing is to get your loved ones off these drugs, but be aware that symptoms can last for a long time.

  2. Dwight, you and your family have my best wishes.

    We seem to be on the verge of a tipping point where there’s finally enough people like us who understand this situation—psych drugs causing great harm rather than helping perceived psych problems—inside out and it follows that awareness about this is getting out there. Even the media is starting (operative word, “starting”) to report about the true dangers these drugs are causing and the deliberate deceit of the drug companies.

    Now go give them hell!

  3. Sara,

    Yes, I have found all of them as well as this site. Many of the authors are previouse SSRI users. http://www.topix.com/forum/drug/effexor/TQ4I2UR28DFD3N759 I haven’t gotten any of the Peter Breggin books, but I fully plan to. My wife is out of reach of me. After “the big night” I did what came natural to me and grabbed my daughter and went to my fathers. Even though every correspondence between myself and my wife were asking her to get help, she only believed that I took my daughter to hurt her and not to protect my daughter. I love her deeply and nothing could be further from the truth. The courts failed us. I had convinced the prosecutor to drop the TPO the next morning thinking everything was going to be alright. I filed and got one judge to grant another one, but as I was doing it, my wife was perjuring herself to get a custody order included with the divorce decree. She made in court like she was wanting to work things out, so we both dropped our custody orders. While it is quite possible with evidence I have to maybe get another one for myself, it wouldn’t cover the child. So I am faced with protecting myself or being there to protect my daughter. NO contest. So I moved back home. It is insane sometimes to hear her talk as if none of this happened and she is about as close to acting like my wife without the physical contact. But her actions produce a completely different perception. She can not look at any pictures of us together. I put them up, she takes them down. This is completely insane and I have to fight to get anybody who has influence over her to believe me. “It can’t be the miracle drug.”

    I am a smart, passionate, resourceful guy. Eili Lilly doesn’t know who I am yet, but I am going to make sure them and all the other SOB’s that push this stuff get to know me. In the month since posting my story in a few places, I have already been contacted by 5 people with the same story happening right now. I would wager that the story of the mom who falsely reported herself and her child kidnapped that is making its way in the news circuit right now has an SSRI influence. They pushed their stuff on the wrong guy. They destroyed the wrong family this time. Once I get my affairs in order whichever way it works out here, I am coming for them. It’s time somebody pull back the curtain on these wizards of Oz.

    I had not receive a response notice. Thank you for informing me. This is a great and helpful site. Keep up the good work. I list it on my own when I get a chance.

  4. Though I am very spiritual v religious, I pulled out my Bible and read Psalms 94. It speaks to what is going on, and what will happen to those who are the crushing, evildoers, who are so far into their narassistic behaviors and denial of wrong doing, it’s like with any addict, but most shrinks have those God like egos that are just begging to be knocked down to ground level. There are exceptions, I found 1 ish out of 5 I saw over a 13 year peroid. Perhaps part of our “job” was to experience this, so we could point it out and CHANGE it.
    We will you know…

  5. Dwight, I’m so sorry this is happening but it’s completely classic. It’s happening over and over again all over the world. I am just reading Medication Madness by Peter Breggin and your story could be right out of his book. You should try to get it so you know that this is typical and you’re not alone and then you should try to find a doctor or therapist who can help you get your wife off Prozac and the kind of help you all really need. Stay reading this site and others like it. Also I’m not sure you are aware but Prozac and other drugs like it can increase a craving for alcohol in many people. Check out our site http://www.ssristories.com for many stories of antidepressant induced harm and bizarre behavior including alcohol problems. At the same time you need to know that she cannot come off Prozac abruptly. Take care and good luck. Those of us creating and reading sites like this are trying desperately to stop this worldwide tragedy by raising awareness. I’m glad you found us.

  6. I am probably going to get attacked for this, but as of lately I am used to it.

    I had never heard it labeled “bitterness” before. My wife and I called it anxiety, of “bitchiness”. We have been together for 12 years. We have a 2 year old. I talked to her about her unfounded angst towards me in front of our daughter one day. She thought about it and sent me an email saying, “I am sorry, I am mean to the ones I love.” That lead to a discussion that she might check out therapy to address it. The therapist immediately recommended her to her doctor for Prozac. Nobody contacted me or talked to me about other noted behavioral issues that would lead them to at least research a possible bi-polar diagnosis. I didn’t get a chance to tell them of my wife’s social alcoholism. They just gave her the dammed happy pills.

    Now a relationship that was exemplary with never a raised voice, never a broken vow, and never reason to distrust is coming to a screeching halt. She is now facing 6 months in jail for assaulting me in front of 2 police officers. She has filed for divorce. she has turned extremely promiscuous. she shows no signs of remorse, guilt, or sense of consequences. This woman that was trying to have a second child with me only the week before, has told me that she never loved me. The irony is that the only thing about her personality that has remained is her “bitterness”.

    Me, my daughter, my family, and her family are all devastated by this change in events. She is the one on this powerful psychotropic drug, getting intoxicated 3 to 4 times a week, and showing no signs of her past self, but I am struggling to get somebody with influence and leverage to go to get taken off the stuff. I mean, It can’t be the drug. The FDA approved it and doctors prescribed it. Never mind it has the same affects as Cocaine.

    1. I’m so sorry David…
      what you describe is a classic adverse reaction to Prozac…but the docs deny it in general…

      I’m terribly terribly sorry.

  7. Shall we pass the collection plate for the poor wizards who have been caught with their collective pants down; and understand their plight, as it is strickly an economic evaluation, and they surely don’t want to end up short sheeted , and BITTER, for lack of money to live like the witchcrafteres they are??

    HELLO??

    The rats are leaving the ship, or is that the Titanic???….

  8. yeah, Michele, that’s all I have too PTSD…(with a bit of PMS thrown in for good measure) and yet they diagnosed me with all sorts of stuff…
    alas…

    welcome to you Michele and to the to the other new commenters as well…

  9. DITTO to everything that’s been said! As a trauma/PTSD survivor, I feel a little, um, bitter that anyone would use PTSD as a model for this ridiculous new disorder.

  10. Psychiatrists are increasingly pathologizing more and more behavior. This is likely done to increase their influence and profits. However, it is bad news for human freedom, because psychiatry is really about control rather than healing.

  11. This is a perfect example of why psychiatry is flawed. Next thing they debate is that new disorder, the crankiness that comes from starvation, from not having enough food to eat, breadline personality disorder. The treatment for this disorder will not be a square meal, but instead zyprexa and cognitive therapy, so expensive the patient will have even less ability to get food and get hungier and bpd will get worse and the doctors will switch to cymbalta and rational emotive therapy because they just can’t understand why the patient is still cranky and of course they’ll recommend no food until the patient learns how to cope with hunger….

  12. Can you imagine the psychological damage of having doctors label you ‘Bitter’? Though I know there’s people who play the victim and always seek some kind of reason to blame others, that are bitter about life. But life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I think these psychiatrists have gone too far.

    But here’s the flip side. There are people who just will not move on. Who constantly dwell on the past letting it drive them nuts….but the implication of treating it through psychiatry is bananas. If I was treated for my bitterness about how I’ve been treated in the mental health system, I wouldn’t be all the better for it. I think strength comes from within.

  13. Psychiatrists believe in magic pills to cure the brain. A brain that isn’t diseased in the classic definition of disease.
    Feelings and emotions are not brain diseases like they think.IMO.
    The psychiatric thought leaders often use “sins” of the past for the base discovery of new diseases. They rename an old sin with a new name and market a PILL for its treatment.
    Old definitions of human behavioural problems were called Vices and Virtues.
    Vice Virtue
    Lust Chastity
    Gluttony Temperance
    Greed Charity
    Sloth Diligence
    Wrath Patience
    Envy Kindness
    Pride Humility

    The description in the post sounds like the old sin (feeling) of Wrath[ “Dante described vengeance as “love of justice perverted to revenge and spite”. In its original form, the sin of wrath also encompassed anger pointed internally rather than externally. ]

  14. Pretty soon psychiatrists will label anyone who criticizes psychiatry as being afflicted with post-psychiatric-treatment-embitterment-disorder or irrational-antipsychiatry-disorder. It will be similar to Stalinist Russia, in which political opponents were declared mentally ill and put in asylums/prisons.

  15. I definitely fall into the category of embitterment disorder, having dealt with psychiatrists, so does my husband. We’re bitter about having been tricked and lied to. As far as I’m concerned psychiatrists are all suffering from GDO – generalized deceit disorder, symptomized by the need to deceive and harm people who have already been harmed by life’s circumstances. Lets get that into the DSM V

    Cheers. Carolyn

  16. It is incredible that the political dimensions of creating such a “disorder” can be completely ignored… Combine this disorder with the ability of a state to force-medicate and you’ve got a truly Happy Land. As has been historically the case, new disorders are being cooked up that can conveniently then be treated, with premium new pharmaceutical concoctions… Fear not, no one will be held accountable for this kind of development, as the vast masses of mentally ill are too beaten down or stigmatized to form a viable protest.

  17. It’s not humans helping humans heal. They are business people classifying a billable potential. They’re just doing their job. It’s too bad they can’t figure the simplest things out. Emotions are puzzles to them. They’re disconnected, pseudo intellectual clones on autopilot, ripe for diagnosis, I might add.

    “Bitterness” another life-long illness for which you will receive your 5 minute consultation and the appropriate medication. There’s really no cure. It’s a mystery.

    “These bitter people seem determined to be cranky and well, volatile.” “We can research (tirelessly) what we can do to modify their potentially dangerous behavior, but most likely they should be identified as terrorists and reported under the Patriot act.” (A dramatization)

  18. Sign me up!!!!!!!!!!!! I don’t “suffer” from BD, I enjoy every minute of it along with my co-morbid EGADS! aka Excessive Generalized Anxiety Disorder Syndrome!
    Adios mi amiga

  19. Thanks Gianna,
    Ah! yes! The “bitter pill”.

    My sugestion: Give all those German psychiatrists et al their own bitter pill. They seem bitter that everyone is not the well running machines that they expect. Machines know nothing of health, healing or understanding. Machines please them!

    We must all be made in the image and likeness of their expectations; well-oiled, smooth running mechanisms. To that end, mechanic’s make mega-bucks..as they fool the people. “Oh! This is wrong and that is wrong with your car”

    Yeah…right…it was running fine before I came in for a simple oil change….

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress.com.

Up ↑

Discover more from Beyond Meds: Alternatives to Psychiatry

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Discover more from Beyond Meds: Alternatives to Psychiatry

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading