
Living with Schizophrenia: Coffee and Friends - k-mcgrady
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/living-with-schizophrenia-coffee-and-friends/
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japhyr
I sure appreciate people who are willing to write openly about personal
experiences with mental illness. It's difficult to deal with, but many times
it seems the hardest part of finding an effective treatment for individuals is
getting past the stigma.

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marincounty
I have found the worst part of mental illness has many heads. There's too
little good science, and we rely on therapies that are still stuck in the
Victorian Era. I, personally, found talk therapies almost a complete waste of
money/time, and might have make my condition worse? If you are going to see a
Therapist having a doctorate is no better than a master's. People will
adamantly defend the profession, but they usually have a vested financial
interest. As to Psychiatrists--I think they are well meaning, but were
manipulated by the pharmacutical companies like the rest of us were. The drug
companies manipulated, cherry picked clinical studies.(Something, I didn't
expect).

These are just my uneducated opinions. The only advise I can offer if you are
coming up in life(20-30's) it is very common to have an emotional breakdown.
There's a lot of pressure to "succeed" in America. Don't let it get the best
of you. I used quotes because I don't know what success is anymore. Some of
our biggest successes are horrid individuals, and always leave out important
details when telling their story. If you do decide to medicate try to keep the
dose down. You will feel better with time. I never thought I would feel
better, but I did get better. My quality of life took a huge dent though, and
I found most people didn't have a clue to how bad I was feeling. These
conditions are truly hidden in many cases.

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Humjob
I absolutely agree with this.

For anyone curious about how psychiatry is bought and paid for by
pharmaceutical companies, read the book "Mad in America" by Robert Whitaker.
He looks at studies of the long-term outcomes for schizophrenia patients who
are treated with drugs versus those who aren't given drugs. What he finds is
that schizophrenics who never take psychiatric drugs have overwhelmingly
better long-term outcomes than those that do.

This isn't a mere selection effect either; the studies track cohorts of people
who were given the same prognosis (bad, medium, or good) at the beginning of
their course of treatment. In each cohort except for the most severe,
individuals who were treated with drugs experienced some short-term relief but
fared far worse than the non-drug subgroup over the long run.

The psychiatry establishment has a long and ugly history of suppressing
alternative treatments which emphasize little/no drug use. There is a massive
vested financial interest in the status quo treatment of keeping
schizophrenics on drugs for as long as possible. In my opinion it's the most
criminal act being perpetrated today on a systemic basis by a supposedly
respectable profession. Forget about Wall Street blowing up the economy with
collateralized debt obligations or politicians underfunding pension
obligations to the tune of billions of dollars; psychiatrists are literally
preying on the brains of the mentally ill in direct contradiction to the
evidence of which treatments work best, all so they can line their pockets
with money.

One concrete example: a study by the World Health Organization found that
schizophrenics in the US and other developed countries fared much worse than
schizophrenics throughout the developing world. What's the common thread among
treatment of schizophrenics in the developed world vs those in the developing
world? Drug use.

This issue strikes near to me since I had a run-in with a psychiatrist when I
was much younger due to anxiety issues/mild psychotic symptoms which have
since been resolved with age and quitting a job which I hated. He kept
pressuring me to take drugs, but when I showed him the aforementioned study
his response to me was astounding: "Well, I haven't personally seen that in
people I've treated." His entire basis of selecting a course of action was
anecdotal data!

[http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology/index.html](http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology/index.html)
\- That's another great resource on the sham science underlying
psychology/psychiatry. Paul has written a number of them, and they're quite
informative.

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lsiebert
Psychiatry/Psychology > schizophrenia drug treatment though. Whitaker has some
points, especially about the way that companies push drugs on people, but his
book would have benefited from both a broader look at drug treatment for
mental illnesses, plural, and a more nuanced discussion of the specifics of
treatment.

He also was really quick to take correlation and imply causation. Like you do
when you talk about the common thread of schizophrenics in the developed world
vs the developing world. You could just as well argue that the difference is
clean drinking water, or any other number of things.

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orionblastar
Society and culture demonizes the mentally ill.

I once earned $150K/year as a programmer until I had a stroke that gave me a
mental illness of schizoaffective disorder. After that my career was over and
I ended up on disability.

I am trying to get off disability, but it seems the business culture does not
want to hire mentally ill people and blackballs us.

Many in my situation just kill themselves because we cannot do the work that
we love to do for a living. I really don't know how I survived this fall, but
I can honestly tell you nobody cares about me.

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muonneutrino
Yeah, society sucks for that - I think it may be getting a bit better, with a
lot more media attention addressing mental illness and the stigma associated
with it (granted, much of this overemphasizes depression and ignores other
forms of mental illness). I'm sorry to hear about your experiences, and while
I don't know what I can personally do to help, I hope you know that there are
certainly people out there who care about you. Mental illness sucks, and
society's ingrained stigmas suck, but often individual people (friends,
family, random strangers you meet at a coffee shop) can help. I wish you the
best.

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616c
I used to work on a suicide hotline, and a crisis hotline, for what it is
worth. I think what people would find useful here is that there is a certain
level of usefullness to anonymous counseling and microfriendships. We had some
people calling weekly because they needed to confide in someone who would get
to know them, but conversely never be too close to them.

Ironically, the only thing that works for me anymore is silence. I find the
less I deal with others the more calm I feel, but that is probably just a
reaction to circumstance.

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shortformblog
Mike Hedrick is a great guy, his Tumblr
([http://thehedrick.com/](http://thehedrick.com/)) is very insightful. As a
writer, he's come far in just a short amount of time.

