Podcasts

Check out the podcast on this page!
From Jennifer Gaita Siciliano (NY) comes “Not As Crazy as you Think”, the podcast which airs on Saturdays at 10am Eastern.

Some podcast guests include Dr. Mark Ragins, ISPS, Tanya Frank, and Janet Werner.

Enjoy!

LACCC presents: Innovations in Recovery Conference, Monday, June 23rd, 8am – 4pm

The LOS ANGELES COUNTY CLIENT COALITION is putting on the 3rd Annual Innovations in Recovery Conference. The conference will ill take place on Monday, June 23, 2014 at the California Endowment Center (Directions & Innovations Conf 2014.flyer)  located at 1000 N. Alameda Street Los Angeles, CA 90012, from 8:00am to 4:00 pm. 

Please join us!!! The Wildflowers’ Movement will be exhibiting and presenting SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND, an innovative workshop with music, singing and art! Our group is about giving & receiving mindful support while practicing self-awareness, cultivating radical wellness, and celebrating diversity. We meet every 1st and 3rd Sunday at SHARE! in Culver City and out at various events, and in nature, our natural habitat.

 

 

MADNESS AND MINDFULNESS: 4 FILMS

Thursday, October 24 – 8 PM at the ECHO PARK FILM CENTER  1200 N Alvarado St. (@ Sunset Blvd.) Los Angeles, CA. 90026 |      (213) 484 – 8846 | info@echoparkfilmcenter.org
The recent films of filmmaker/activist Ken Paul Rosenthal are provocative and beautiful works of conscious cinema that re-envision the way we think, speak and feel about mental distress and wellness in today’s chaotic world. These transformative films weave personal and political narratives through natural and urban landscapes, home movies, and archival social hygiene films. Mad Dance: A Mental Health Film Trilogy, consisting of For Shadows (2013, 26 minutes), a contemplative, multi-layered memoir that unravels the tangled roots of self-harm while coming to terms with one’s shadow; In Light In! (2013, 12 minutes) a haunting, visual essay about the awkward and angry junctures where our culture struggles to manage its emotional distress; and Crooked Beauty (2002, 30 minutes), the much-lauded poetic documentary on artist/activist Jacks McNamara and the foundation of the Icarus Project. Program also includes Rosenthal’s I My Bike (2002, 5 minutes), a cine-poetic work traces the conflict between urban space and the body.

Ken Paul Rosenthal in person! www.maddancementalhealthfilmtrilogy.com

Could DSM-5 Be Harmful to Your Mental Health?

By Elayne Clift, posted on February 2, 2012 by the Women’s Media Center

The APA diagnostic manual revision process, in the news recently over the definition of autism, holds other potential threats for women’s health. Elayne Clift investigates the gender issues in DSM-5.

Debbie N. (not her real name) was a college student in the 1990s when she traveled to the Mediterranean to recover from an abusive relationship. Partying hard, a cultural norm for her immigrant family, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Back in the States, using alcohol and drugs to numb her pain, she entered Harvard where she earned a master’s degree.  There, diagnosed bi-polar and prescribed Lithium (which permanently impaired her thyroid function), she was given anti-depressants and told she would require meds for the rest of her life.  Now, after several hospitalizations and agonizing self-doubt, she is free of medication, owns her own business, and leads a healthy lifestyle based on rest, nutrition, exercise and meditation.  “I consider myself to be a sensitive person who’s been through a lot of loss. I changed my lifestyle and took responsibility for my behaviors.  I’m a survivor.”

Stories like Debbie’s are ubiquitous, and so troubling that as the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, is being prepared for release in 2013, clinicians formerly involved in its preparation are calling for major reform of the text that has driven psychiatric diagnosis and treatment for decades.  Many of them will participate in “Boycott Normal,” a demonstration planned for May 5, when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) meets in Philadelphia and is likely to vote to go forward and publish the DSM-5.

“This is not a civil war between establishment psychiatry and so-called radicals,” says boycott organizer David W. Oaks, executive director of MindFreedom International.  We are trying to put the debate into a human rights framework because the DSM has been used to discriminate, to take away liberties, and to allocate resources.  It’s a quasi-legal document written by a few hundred people voted on by rich white males.”

Dr. Allen Frances, who chaired the task force revising DSM-4, is among those psychiatrists now calling for reform, along with organizations like the American Counseling Association, the British Psychological Society, and a division of the American Psychological Association. But that effort focuses on the process of deciding what diagnoses should be included in the “psychiatrists’ bible” and how those diagnoses should be determined within the existing framework of the DSM.

Many feminist psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers are calling for stronger actions, including a boycott of the DSM-5 by clinicians, and Congressional hearings to address psychiatric diagnosis and the damaging effects of labeling people deemed to be “mentally ill.”

Foremost among these advocates is feminist psychologist Paula J. Caplan, a fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and the Joan-of-Arc of the new PLAN T Alliance (Psychiatric Labeling Action Network for Truth). The alliance is a coalition of individuals and organizations formed because of frustration with the unscientific nature of the DSM, the harm done to many people who receive arbitrary diagnostic labels, and the unwillingness of the APA to undertake serious reform.

“It is increasingly clear that the editors of the major psychiatric manual, which reaps huge profits for the APA, are ignoring the massive evidence of harm done by the labels of previous editions of the manual and of likely harm from what they plan to put in the [DSM-5],” says Caplan, who resigned from two prior DSM committees because “they were playing fast and loose with the unscientific research related to diagnosis.”

Critics of the alliance’s call to action believe its attempts at serious reform are what one called a “broadside” against psychiatry.  Many support a parallel petition seeking DSM-5 revisions.  While one prominent psychiatrist active in the development of previous DSMs acknowledges that there are serious problems with DSM-5, he argues that activist groups are criticizing the DSM-5 to smear all psychiatry in a way that is detrimental to people whom it could help.

But given what’s coming in DSM-5, the manual itself appears to be detrimental, especially for women, children and the elderly.  For example, grief after the loss of a loved one could be labeled “depression,” leading to medication if it lasts longer than two months.

“Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” PMS, is slated to return to the DSM, pathologizing many menstruating women.  “Binge Eating Disorder,” with alarmingly normal indicators, will be included, as will “Borderline Personality Disorder,” with roughly 75 percent of patients given that label being women. according to Dr. Dana Becker of the Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work.

“Sexual dysfunctions” such as “Female Orgasmic Disorder,” defined as a “persistent or recurrent delay in, or absence of, orgasm following a normal sexual excitement phase” is another concern.  The diagnosis is “based on the clinician’s judgment that the woman’s orgasmic capacity is less than would be reasonable given her age, sexual experience, and the adequacy of sexual stimulation she receives.”  DSM-5 modifications describe further symptoms, an exercise NYU psychologist Dr. Leonore Tiefer calls an attempt at “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Feminist psychologists have been challenging DSM diagnoses since the 1980s when the Association for Women in Psychology coordinated a petition regarding DSM-III-R.  Today they are joined by others in a groundswell of opposition to the APA’s newest effort.

Al Galves, executive director of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry, is among them. He wants to see DSM-5 jargon replaced with relevant terms reflecting the stresses of modern life—loss, despair, loneliness, hopelessness—words relating to “emotional distress, spiritual emergencies, life crises, and difficult dilemmas.”  The question, he says, is “how do you get the psychiatric establishment and the pharmaceutical industry to revamp totally” so that they move away from the language of the medical model and use ordinary words to facilitate helping people who are suffering.

Dr. David Elkins, professor emeritus of Psychology at Pepperdine University, agrees it’s time to frame harm done by the DSM as a “social justice issue,” although he stops short of endorsing the PLAN T Alliance call for a boycott just yet.  In a letter to the DSM-5 Task Force and the APA on behalf of the division for Humanistic Psychology/American Psychological Association, he called for “an external, independent review” to ensure that the DSM-5 is “safe and credible.”

But perhaps Paula J. Caplan put it best in posting a petition at change.org:  “This call is not an attack on or a questioning of psychotherapy or even diagnosis across the board but simply an attempt to draw attention to this minimally investigated enterprise of psychiatric diagnosis and to find ways to protect people from the harm that can result.”

Inventing Disorders

The Psychiatric Drugging of Children

published in CounterPunch, by Evelyn Pringle

Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, “the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is the most appalling with the most serious consequences for the future of individual lives and for society,” warns the world-renowned expert, Dr. Peter Breggin, often referred to as the “Conscience of Psychiatry” says, “We’re bringing up a generation in this country in which you either sit down, shut up and do what you’re told, or you get diagnosed and drugged,” he points out.

Zip It by Rachel K.

Breggin considers the situation to be “a national tragedy.”  “To inflict these drugs on the growing brains of infants and children is wrong and abusive,” he contends. The kids who get drugged are often our best, brightest, most exciting and energetic children, he points out. “In the long run, we are giving children a very bad lesson that drugs are the answer to emotional problems.”

Dr. Nathaniel Lehrman, author of the book, “Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs,” believes that giving infants and toddlers “powerful, brain-effecting psychiatric medication is close to criminal activity.” “Giving them these drugs,” he says, “has no rationale, and ignores the basic fact that youngsters are very sensitive to their environments, both social and chemical, with the juvenile brain easily damaged by the latter.”

During an interview on ABC Radio National in August 2007, Dr. David Healy, the noted British pharmacology expert, and author of the book, “Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder,” told reporter Jane Shields:  “Just to give you a feel for how crazy things have actually got recently, it would appear that clinicians in the US are happy to look at the ultrasounds of children in the womb, and based on the fact that they appear to be more overactive at times, and then possibly less active later, they’re prepared to actually consider the possibility that these children could be bipolar.”

On April 9, 2009, Christopher Lane, author of the book, “Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness,” published an interview on his Psychology Today blog with Dr. Healy. In the interview, Healy explained the history behind the drastic rise in the sale of anticonvulsants and antipsychotics as “mood stabilizers,” and the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “The key event in the mid-1990s that led to the change in perspective was the marketing of Depakote by Abbott as a mood stabilizer,” Healy tells Lane, and further explains:

“Mood stabilization didn’t exist before the mid-1990s. It can’t be found in any of the earlier reference books and journals. Since then, however, we now have sections for mood stabilizers in all the books on psychotropic drugs, and over a hundred articles per year featuring mood stabilization in their titles.  

In the same way, Abbott and other companies such as Lilly marketing Zyprexa for bipolar disorder have re-engineered manic-depressive illness. While the term bipolar disorder was there since 1980, manic-depression was the term that was still more commonly used until the mid-1990s when it vanishes and is replaced by bipolar disorder. Nowadays, over 500 articles per year feature bipolar disorder in their titles.”

“As of 2008, upwards of a million children in the United States—in many cases preschoolers—are on “mood-stabilizers” for bipolar disorder, even though the condition remains unrecognized in the rest of the world,” Healy points out.

“But there is no evidence that the drugs stabilize moods,” he says. “In fact, it is not even clear that it makes sense to talk about a mood center in the brain.” “A further piece of mythology aimed at keeping people on the drugs,” he reports, “is that these are supposedly neuroprotective—but there’s no evidence that this is the case and in fact these drugs can lead to brain damage.”

Healy says the FDA’s decision to add a black-box warning about suicide to SSRIs likely had little to do with the switch to prescribing antipsychotics as safer for children. What “was quite striking was how quickly companies were able to use the views of the few bipolar-ologists who argued that when children become suicidal on antidepressants it’s not the fault of the drug,” he points out.

“The problem, they said, stems from a mistaken diagnosis and if we could just get the diagnosis right and put the child on mood stabilizers then there wouldn’t be a problem,” he explains. “There is no evidence for this viewpoint, but it was interesting to see how company support could put wind in the sails of such a perspective,” he says. Because having just one label was very limiting, Healy says, child psychiatry “needed another disorder—and for this reason bipolar disorder was welcome.”

He reports that the same thing is happening to children labeled with ADHD. “Not all children find stimulants suitable,” he advises, “and just as with the SSRIs and bipolar disorder it has become very convenient to say that the stimulants weren’t causing the problem the child was experiencing; the child in fact had a different disorder and if we could just get the diagnosis correct, then everything else would fall into place.”

A report titled, “Adverse Events Associated with Drug Treatment of ADHD: Review of Postmarketing Safety Data,” presented at the FDA’s March 22, 2006, Pediatric Advisory Committee meeting bears witness to Healy’s explanation by stating in part: “The most important finding of this review is that signs and symptoms of psychosis or mania, particularly hallucinations, can occur in some patients with no identifiable risk factors, at usual doses of any of the drugs currently used to treat ADHD.”

Between January 2000, and June 30, 2005, the FDA identified nearly 1,000 cases of psychosis or mania linked to the drugs in its own database and those from the drug makers themselves. The antipsychotics are just as dangerous as the SSRI antidepressants, Healy says. “Long before the antidepressants were linked with akathisia, the antipsychotics were universally recognized as causing this problem,” he explains in the Lane interview. “It was also universally accepted that the akathisia they induce risked precipitating the patient into suicidality or violence.”“In addition,” he points out, “these drugs are known to cause a range of neurological syndromes, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and other problems.” “They also cause a physical dependence,” Healy states. “Zyprexa is among the drugs most likely to cause people to become physically dependent on it.”

“It’s hard to understand how blind clinicians can get to problems like these, especially in youngsters who grow obese and become diabetic right before their eyes,” Healy tells Lane. As for what he calls the “medicalization of childhood,” in the radio interview, Healy points out that “children always have been unhappy, they always have been nervous, but that’s actually part and parcel of being a child.” “You have to go through these things,” he said. “This is how we learn to cope with the problems of life.”

Children can best be helped in the safest way, he says, “if they’re just seen and if they actually have the opportunity to talk about their problems, and if they get basic and sensible input about how to perhaps help them cope with these problems.”

Healy said it’s important to remember that severe mental illness is rare in children and that most children with a mental health problem…

continues

Community support groups

Throughout the the world new mental health consumer/survivor support and recovery groups are springing up left and right. Portland Hearing Voices is just one of those new community groups that promotes mental diversity through public education, discussion groups, and community support related to hearing voices, seeing visions, and having unusual beliefs and sensory experiences often labeled as psychosis, bipolar, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. Their main goal is to “reduce fear and misunderstanding, question stereotypes, promote holistic health options, overcome isolation, and create a more inclusive and supportive community.” Program Director, Will Hall, was interviewed by Newsweek magazine and in his interview he said, “Psychiatrists are prone to making arbitrary distinctions between ‘crazy’ and ‘healthy’.  While diagnosed as having ‘schizophrenia’, he argues for acceptance of ‘different minds’.

The Mad pride movement began in the 1960s and 1970s, when maverick psychiatrists started questioning the boundaries between sane and insane, and patients began resisting psychiatric care, especially the kind they considered coercive.  It was formalized in the early 1990s in the UK, mostly around London. Mad Pride activists seek to reclaim terms such as ‘mad’, ‘nutter’ and ‘psycho’ from misuse, such as in newspapers. Through a series of mass media campaigns, Mad Pride activists seek to re-educate the general public on such subjects as the causes mental diversities, the experiences of those using the mental health system and the alternative healing methods that exist outside the world of the big ‘pharmacieutical businesses’.

On May 11, 2008, Gabrielle Glaser documented Mad Pride in The New York Times. Glaser stated, “Just as gay-rights activists reclaimed the word ‘queer’ as a badge of honor rather than a slur, these advocates proudly call themselves mad; they say their conditions do not preclude them from productive lives.”  The Mad Pride movement was further mentioned in The Huffington Post.

Today Mad Pride are mostly groups that celebrate human rights and focus on diversity, which really includes everyone. MindFreedom has many new alerts and event information on its site. Other support groups include the Mad Tea Party in Chicago and the Freedom Center in Northampton, Mass., which provides education, acupuncture, yoga and peer discussions to about 100 participants. The ABC-TV show Primetime Outsiders ran a segment about Mad Pride on August 25, 2009 that included interviews with actor Joey Pantoliano; musician Madigan Shive; and David W. Oaks, Director, MindFreedom International.

This mental diversity approach helps us to explore creativity, spirituality, trauma, and sensitivity beyond all conventional medical labels.  By exploring these avenues, we are able to learn from each other, while we also learn from and live with our experiences, struggle with emotional distress and pain and respect the positive sides of what we go through.

Most of these new support groups, like The Icarus Project welcome diverse personal interpretations and ways of coping. The Wildflowers’ Movement focuses on self-acceptance, which is the key to recognizing who we truly are. Self-awareness and self-consciousness are to be cultivated daily in order to maintain self-acceptance. Through accepting the mental diversity of all people, we become aware of ourselves and accept ourselves. It is through this path of enlightenment that we reach a healing point beyond any medication. Dialogue and community interactions are vechicles to create greater understanding towards our recovery and healing.

Psychiatry … a disordered science

The following video is an awakening for those who need it and don’t realize the truth behind what psychiatry really is.