Archive for the ‘Biology of BPD’ Category

I now have a new site where I will be sharing much more about recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder. This site will include video, audio, blogs, and coming very soon – excerpts from my up-coming memoir about my recovery from BPD in 1995 and my audio autobiography which is a prelude to the  memoir in which I share the impacting and noteworthy aspects of my “borderline years” along with some childhood experiences that were central to all that I had to get through in the therapy that was my process of recovery. There is so much hope  for BPD recovery – hope that is being negated by systemic stigma and hidden agendas within many areas of the mental health delivery system these days. What do you need to know more about? Why do so many say you can’t recover from Borderline Personality Disorder? Why do they say that? What is BPD really, anyway? Remember, what you think creates your experience, so be very careful about what you think about what BPD is, how it is treated, who knows what, and what causes it and much more.

There is too much being said these days by too many about all that is negative about Borderline Personality Disorder. Too many people focus too much on the stereotypical, limiting, devaluing, pathologizing of human beings who are living their lives with BPD – in an out-of-balance way. That’s not something entirely pathological at all. It is a reactive-response to unaddressed and unhealed woundedness. People with  Borderline Personality Disorder are not all the same. People with  BPD, especially in a relational context, exhibit what it means to be human in very intense and polarized ways. Not pathological, but out-of-balance ways.

The traits that psychiatry as used to define Borderline Personality Disorder are human traits. How is it that they took what are human traits and twisted them into a pathology that they named Borderline Personality Disorder and then abandoned anyone diagnosed with it saying that you can’t get better. Can’t get better from what? Being human in intensely polarized ways? Say what?

And to further complicate that reality that people with Borderline Personality Disorder can get well, in the last decade or so, now these (not all but a lot) psychiatrists have created, yes created, what is now known as biopsychiatry. Biopsychiatry, essentially came out of what is not being referred to as “the decade of the brain” – the 1990′s. “Decade of the brain” – what? Did the brain need a decade? What does this mean? What was the focus on the brain about and who was doing the focusing? What was the purpose of this focus? These are important questions to keep in mind when you consider what BPD really is versus what biospsychiatry says it is and what that means for recovery and what that means to the process of actual recovery versus being kept stuck in what psychiatrists and the mental profession continue to claim is such “pathology”.

The “decade of the brain” saw many studies be reported, actually, marketed to the public. Studies that made all sorts of claims about Borderline Personality Disorder, and indeed, mental illness generally, as “brain disorder” or “brain disease”. Do you like science fiction? I personally, don’t really. It’s a lot of fantasy and illusion with high-tech special effects. Oh, wait, rather just like the studies of the “decade of the brain” and beyond. What most people don’t know or realize, unless they question the mass-marketing of supposed study-findings that conclude Borderline Personality Disorder is a “brain disorder” is that these studies were largely funded – if not entirely funded – by Big Pharma, mainly in the United States to begin with. The big money of Big Pharma (pharaceutical companies – drug companies) looked for a more effective way to market their products. That’s what is behind biopsychiatry. A “marriage” of sorts between Big Pharma and its marketing machine and big dollars to advertising in all forms of media meets “mental health professionals” who also want to make more money. Where is the actual mental health consumer/client/patient in this “relationship”?

If you believe that biopsychiatry, which is also known as the “medical model of psychiatry”, has the any proof of their claims – claims that they put across about mental illness as a “brain disorder” to sell drugs to people that actually, in the long run, obfuscate recovery and make it more difficult for people thus meaning they will be more reliant on the drugs and the prescribing mental health professionals – I hope you will think again, do some research and do your best not to get caught up in or trapped in their smoke-and-mirror pseduo-science. A “science”, this “brain disorder” junk they say their “studies” back-up as if it were proof when at best it is only theory, if that, takes your humanity out of the equation. It doesn’t look at you, the mental health consumer/client/patient as a whole person at all. But then, should that be surprising given the fact that the traits they list, for example, in the DSM-IV as “pathological” as “mental illness” as “personality disordered traits” are human traits that they themselves have defined as pathology?

You can recover from Borderline Personality Disorder. I did. What can block your ability to get well and to recover is being fooled by biopsychiatry into believing that you have a “brain disorder” and that only those who create the “illness” can cure it. But can they? NO! Do they even try? NO! That’s right – biopsychiatry, largely backed by, created by, and funded by Big Pharma has a different agenda other than treating people with BPD and mental illness – they are serving themselves, not you!

Sound controversial? Sound crazy? Sound impossible? Well, if you want to know more about where I am coming from with this please do visit my newest site at bpdmemoir.com where I will be talking more about recovery and what kind of thinking supports recovery and what kind of thinking will keep you stuck in the pain of Borderline Personality Disorder.

I’ll also be speaking to Loved Ones of those with BPD about what types of misinformation you need to pay more attention to so that you have all the information you need to make decisions in your best interest. Many books in the last few years targeted at BPD Loved Ones, BPD Family members, partners, and ex-partners, co-workers, etc., of those with BPD have mislead you also in terms of this “medical model of BPD” that is really not about supporting wellness or recovery and is more about an industry making money and yes, exploiting people’s pain.

© A.J. Mahari, December 21, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Borderline Personality Disorder may still be diagnosed more in women than men. What does this mean? It is unlikely that fewer men have Borderline Personality Disorder. It is likely that the numbers aren’t as skewed as many believe, or as stereotypes and stigma forward. There is a bias among most who diagnosed mental illness. Many men who may in fact have BPD can end up being diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) instead. I have many clients who are men with Borderline Personality Disorder. What is often over-looked is that young children have needs. Needs that must be addressed sufficiently in order for psychologically and spiritually healthy emotional development regardless of gender.

I also think it is high time that we seriously start to do away with labels like “high functioning borderline” and “low functioning borderline”. The internet is replete with what is actually the very inaccurate and not at all meaningful labels everywhere, of late, it seems. Ask yourself, what do these sub-labels, if you will, actually mean? How do they help anyone? These labels have their origin with an author who is not a mental health professional. These labels have not been introduced by responsible mental health professionals.

The label of Borderline Personality Disorder, in fact, of “personality disorder” of any kind has long been debated by those in the anti-psychiatry movement which is made up largely of people who now, in growing numbers, oppose what is known as biopsychiatry and the erroneous forwarding of mental illness generally, and Borderline Personality Disorder, specifically, as “brain disease” or “brain disorders”.  There is no independent, reliable, scientifically proven or known “brain disease” for mental illness at all. Studies that are put out by media, some professionals and then quoted by some book authors are not proven and are largely funded by pharmaceutical companies looking to make money off of and by disempowering the mentally ill.

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• The Shame of Abandonment in BPD
• From False Self To Authentic Self In BPD – Getting In Touch With Your Inner Child
• BPD and Abandonment
• Finding Hope From the Polarized Reality of BPD
• Preparing For Recovery From BPD
• Emotion Dysregulation in BPD
• Rage Addiction in Borderline Personality Disorder

 

       Audio Programs © A.J. Mahari

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Whether you are a man or a woman diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, the reality is that you are not character flawed. You are not broken beyond repair, and, you cannot be cured or find recovery by taking dangerous psychiatric medications. Biopsychiatry’s forwarding of these dangerous medications as treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder disempowers those with BPD – male and female.

As a BPD and Mental Health Coach, and as someone who recovered from BPD 15 years ago, I know that medications are not the answer. No one is held prisioner to BPD by his or her brain – no one! I recovered and I was not on psychiatric medication. At best there is a combination of some neurobiological issues and environment – early childhood experiences and perception that set the stage for the arrested psychological, emotional, and spiritual development of those who go on to be diagnosed with BPD. The brain and the mind are not one in the same.

There are many ways to learn how to empower yourself. Take back your own power to find healing, recovery, and wellness. This is what I help my BPD and mental health coaching clients do each and every day. Be careful what you believe. If you think that because the pharmaceutical companies, mainly in the United States, foward the notion of what is really pseudo science, not proven science at all, that BPD is a “brain thing” please do some more research. Please listen to three professionals that I’ve interviewed on my Psyche Whisperer Radio Show Dr. Niall McLaren, M.D., Dr. John Breeding, Ph.D. and Dr. Dan L. Edmunds founder of the International Center for Humane Psychiatry.

Many people that I coach who have Borderline Personality Disorder, just like the many clients I coach who are loved ones of someone with BPD or partners or ex-partners of someone with BPD, the challenges for all have more in common than more that is wholly different. The challenges of those diagnosed with BPD, male or female, do not include having a “brain disorder” or “brain disease”. People who forward this inaccurate information do so to cash in on the disempowering of human beings who look to them for help. Educate yourself about this.

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• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES packaged together with or without audio.
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together with or without audio.
• A.J.’s Audio Program The Shame of Abandonment in BPD
• A.J.’s Audio Programs For Borderlines and Non Borderlines

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Life Coaches, BPD and Mental Health Coaches, forwarding the agenda of biopsychiatry are not doing so to truly serve you. You risk being disempowered by these people, whether they are well-meaning or not. In my life coaching practice and philosophy the focus in on empowering the client, and not on forwarding the agenda of any mental health professional or association. Life coaching, BPD and Mental Health Coaching, in my philososphy and practice is not about the methods and means employed by mental health professionals and has nothing to do with the agenda and money-making machine of psychiatry today – most of which ascribes to biopsychiatry.

Men with Borderline Personality Disorder, like their female counterparts also diagnosed with Borderline Personality are individuals who often have successful careers but great difficulty in interpersonal relationships. There are many ways of being in this world and the black and white definitions that so many use to denote mental illness from mental health are also faulty and self-serving.

There are different levels of functioning in both genders and for many with BPD their are more obstacles to succeeding in work as well as interpersonal relating. There is nothing about this, however, that need be or that can even scientifically (in any proven way) be ascribed to the biology of your brain. Choose to empower yourself and educate yourself about the role of the money-making machine known as Big Pharma and the funding of studies that are being misrepresented as proven science and all of which conclude that men or women with BPD should be medicated and often heavily medicated with dangerous drugs that they don’t give you full disclosure about. It is these drugs that cause chemical imbalances in the brain, not the diagnosis or presense of the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder in your life.

Whether you are male of female recovery is possible. That recovery will hinge upon you educating yourself and freeing yourself from the misinformation of organizations like Nami in the United States who are over 56% funded by Big Pharma. Big Pharma and psychiatric drugs mean big money for many mental health organizations – claiming to advocate for those they claim to serve. Big pharma means big money for many psychiatrists who practice from the model of biopsychiatry.

Some say there are positives to having Borderline Personality Disorder. I don’t agree. I think that people who are diagnosed with BPD, again whether male or female, have many positive qualities, talents, and passions, not everything about you needs to be attributed, one way or another, to Borderline Personality Disorder. In fact, I would challenge you to re-think how much you relate most things in your life good or bad as having some relation to what it means to have been diagnosed with BPD.

And, I’ll add, are people with BPD really “too sensitive”? I don’t think so. I think that sensitivity is an individual thing. So is temperament. Psychiatry with the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder labels you, stigmatizes you, de-humanizes and pathologizes your experience in life, and your feelings and to what end? To convince you that you are so “flawed” and (many still say) beyond help that you need drugs for the rest of your life. NO, you don’t. And that way of treating you is abusive. It is not help. It is not support. It does not contain compassion. It does not recognize you or care at all about who you or what you have experienced in your life.

In my BPD and Mental health Coaching caring about you, having compassion for you, validating your experiences and/or perceptions - your ways of thinking about those experiences, is at the center of the process of the journey of working together to help you to learn skills that will create wellness, enhance the quality of your life and set you squarely on the road to recovery.

© A.J. Mahari, September 26, 2010 – All rights reserved.

 

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Are you needing some professional help or guidance? Are you feeling stressed out? Perhaps you have been diagnosed with a mental illness and what does that mean?

Before you assume you know or that the diagnosing psychiatrist knows or  has your best interests in mind in an ethical way you will benefit from reading this essay by Dr. John Breeding who is a psychologist in practice in Texas.

Biopsychiatry, fronting for the pharmaceutical industry is marketing pseudo-science to you under the guise of it being treatment. Under the guise of being “treatment” that will help you. Before you get caught up in the medication nightmare of biopsychiatry do your homework and research what’s really going on behind the marketing message of “studies” that are “proving” things claimed without actually having proven anything. Advocate for yourself and for your rights as a mental health consumer. Too many people believe the first thing they hear that they think they need and that they think will help them get better, feel better, find their way to wellness. The reality is that, more often than not, that first message you hear may well be the big marketing machine of big pharma that has biopsychiatry as its main advocate and messenger. Marketing, advocates, and messengers that are well paid by pharmaceutical companies. Many mental health professionals, mainly, psychiatrists - biopsychiatrists are not only well-paid in various ways by pharmaceutical compaines raising questions about their lack of ethics but they are also paid spokespeople for one or in many cases multiple drug manufactures.

© A.J. Mahari, August 16, 2010 – All rights reserved.

READ Dr. Breeding’s Essay …

 

 

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Are you normal? Do the concepts of Mental Health and Mental Illness serve any purpose other than to divide people arbitrarily and cause people shame that alienates them from themselves? Does psychiatry today, and more specifically biopsychiatry even believe that anyone is or can be normal? What is normal? Many argue that biopsychiatry – the direction the psychiatric profession is taking in defining mental illlness as “brain disorder” or “brain disease” and then seeking to treat it with all kinds of medications, many that do way more harm than good, is predicated on labeling almost everyone with something which calls into question just what disordered means.

Dr. John Breeding Ph.D. was my guest on The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show, Wednesday August 4th, live at 3pm EST. You can now listen to the archived interview here. Dr. Breeding talked about, among other things, psychiatric oppression and what mental health consumers really do need to know and think more about when it comes to what mental illness is and how it can be most effectively treated and coped with if it even is what it is thought by so many people to be. What are the implications of biopsychiatry for people given the label and diagnosis  of Borderline Personality Disorder?

 

LISTEN HERE

 

The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show & A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.

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Have you heard that mental illness, according to some in the profession of psychiatry (mainly in the United States) is “brain disease”? What do you think? Is it a coincidence that many studies aiding in these theories of what is known as biopsychiatry are being made on the basis of the outcomes of studies that are largely funded by pharmaceutical companies in the United States? Do you think that all psychiatrists or even all psychologists agree with this un-proven conclusion? Many do  not agree. One very well known opponent of his own profession’s all-too-common practice in recent years is Australian psychiatrist, Dr. Niall (Jock) McLaren. On Friday July 23, 2010, 7pm EST on The Psyche Whisperer Radio Show on blogtalkradio, A.J. Mahari will interview Dr. McLaren on this topic and talk to him about the two books he’s authored and the very courageous stance he has taken that has not left him popular in the profession of psychiatry.

 

 

Niall (Jock) McLaren, MD, is an Australian psychiatrist, author and theoretician. His work opposes the mainstream view in psychiatry to the extent that he argues modern psychiatry has no scientific basis whatsoever. However, he insists that he is not “anti-psychiatry,” but a committed scientist following his duty of criticizing the prevailing models in his field in order to improve it. He is the author of the two books, Humanizing Madness: Psychiatry and the Cognitive Neurosciences. 2007; and Humanizing Psychiatry: The Biocognitive Model. 2009. He is working on another book due out later this year.

 

READ MORE

 

© A.J. Mahari and The Psyche Whisperer Radio show

 

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Science is now learning more about neuroplasticity by studying Tibetan Monks. Compassion is thought to be very central to gamma activity which is an example of neuroplastic change. There are many parallels between modern science and the Buddhism view.

More and more science is teaching us that the brain can change itself and that the brain has an amazing capacity to create new neuronal pathways. This is a positive source of hope for people with many types of brain injury or varying illnesses as well as those who have been diagnosed with a form of mental illness.

There is a growing body of evidence that counters the biopsychiatric view of mental illness as a stagnant and essentially unchangable “brain disease”. This growing evidence has at its core an increasing understanding of just how much the brain can actually change and heal itself in ways that were once not thought or known to be possible.

© A.J. Mahari, April 27, 2010

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Medication for mental illness at the alarming rate it is being prescribed is nothing more than dangerous mind candy. Mind candy that cannot effectively address most challenges in mental illness. If one pathologizes mental illness in the narrow and rigid ways of psychiatry and its pseudo-science then one might want to fall in line with the illusion that pills are the long-sought after cure-all. However, they are not any cure-all whatsoever. When mental illness and its suffering are viewed from a different perspective it becomes much more clear that human beings do experience pain and suffering and that what is at issues is to what extent, and what can be done to help people to find balance and to find middle-ground from which they can find new ways to understand themselves and to find healing, growth, and transformative change.

The rise in the prescribing of medication by many in the psychiatric profession has turned psychobabble: “writing or talk using jargon from psychiatry or psychotherapy” (dictionary.com)  into biobabble: “knee-jerk biological determinism” (Kathleen H. Dockett, G. Rita Dudley-Grant, and C. Peter Bankart – authors of the book, Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology) What do you think? How can you find your way to effective and safe treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder or other forms of mental illness if you don’t stop to consider the pharmaceutical agenda that drives biobabble? Can you? Who do you believe? Are you aware of the shift in psychiatry from analysis to medication? What are the ramifications of this? On the line is the mental health and well-being of millions of people. Underneathe it all what is the true quest – to treat and to cure or to make money?

According to the Polly Young-Eisendrath in the book, Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology),

“In the last two decades of the twentieth century, our popular and scientific accounts of human suffering have been inching their way toward a new form of scientific reductionism: a knee-jerk biological determinism that I call “biobabble,”

This is the widespread tendency to use terms (e.g. adaptation) that come from various aspects of the biological sciences to attempt to explain human actions and moods without even a reasonable understanding of the term, the science, the associated theory (or lack of it), and/or the target of explanation.

Biobabble names biological, evolutionary, and physical processes as the primary causes for many human traits and behaviors from the undesirable (like alcoholism and schizophrenia) to the sublime (like altruism and happiness). In my view, biobabble confuses and harms us in our attempts to understand and alleviate human suffering, on both an individual and a communal level.

By the term “suffering” here, I mean specifically the Buddhist notion of dukkha, which is typically translated as “suffering” in English. Dukkha literally refers to a state of being off-center or out-of-balance, like a bone slightly out of its socket or a wheel riding off its axle. I will use the word “suffering” to mean a state of being in which we are out of kilter because of a subjective disturbance that may be as mild as a momentary frustration or as severe as a depressive or psychotic state.”

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• Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES or 3 Non Borderline Ebooks packaged together with audio.
• Purchase A.J. Mahari’s 5 “Core Wound of Abandonment” in BPD series ebooks 
• Non Borderlines – You can purchase 6 ebooks packaged together without audio or 6 ebooks bundled together with 2 audio programs 6 ebooks packaged together with 2 audio programs
• Those with BPD and/or Non Borderlines can purchase A.J. Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks or Mahari’s 3 “Core Wound of Abandonment” series ebooks with From False Self To Authentic Self In BPD – The Inner Chid Audio Program
  

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As Polly Young-Eisendrath makes clear in the above quote, suffering, and much of what can be pathologized in being labelled mental illness as narrowly defined by the bible of psychiatry – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V), can be viewed in a different way, in a different context. Suffering if thought of as being out of balance or being “off-center” can be understood to be part of the spectrum of human experience. When you stop to think how much of that experience is individual and spiritual the idea of a pill to fix everything seems even less credible than it may seem in the face of sophisticated jargon thrown around to pathologize human experience in its more extreme forms.

The labelling of many mental illnesses as “brain diseases” in the last 10 or so years has led to what many professionals are countering now as pseudo-science – an ideology that isn’t anymore supported, proven, or documented than older ideologies that maintain that much of mental illness has more to do with emotional/psychological and psychosocial elements of human experience than anything biological and literally physically brain-based or genetic.

So much money that need to go directly to patient treatment and mental health delivery systems may well be instead going – flowing really – to not only pharmaceutical companies but also to the studies, professional papers, books etc., that they fund. A vicious circle of  profit that has little to do with actually helping the mentally ill get well.

In the book,   Psychology and Buddhism: From Individual to Global Community (International and Cultural Psychology),  Belinda Siew Luan Khong clarifies the, “synergy between the concept of human responsibility in Heidegger’s philosophy, existential analysis, and the notion of dependent origination in Buddhism.” “… One of the many interesting points that Khong makes is that both in Buddhism and in daseinsanalysis teh individual’s journey of discovery is make possible by the faithful companionship of a teacher, a teacher who may largely be a silent partner whose attentiveness supports the client’s efforts towards mindfulness.”

Daseinsanalytic Psychotherapy

The word Dasein has been used by several philosophers before Heidegger, most notably Ludwig Feuerbach, with the meaning of human “existence” or “presence”. It is derived from da-sein, which literally means being-there/there-being, though Heidegger was adamant that this was an inappropriate translation of Dasein. In German, Dasein is the German vernacular term for existence.

 

According to Gion Condrau, International Federation of Daseinsanalysis “Daseinsanalysis owes its origin and development to the spiritual renewal in the wake of the two world wars. In the realm of psychiatry, a movement began in the twenties which was partly triggered by the discussions around Freudian psychoanalysis, partly by a scientific unease with regard to the traditional, systematizing, clinical psychopathology, and which was searching for a new understanding of the basics of human existence and its disturbances. The one-sided, natural-scientific orientation of psychiatry and psychotherapy, in particular, was the subject of heated criticism. This gave rise to the so-called “anthropological” psychiatry, initiated by renowned researchers such as Ludwig Binswanger, Viktor von Weizsäcker, Viktor von Gebsattel, Eugene Minkowski, Erwin Straus, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, and others.”

Condrau concludes, “lt is obviously not correct – as occasionally is done – to put existential analysis as ‘philosophy’ in contrast to psychoanalysis as ‘science’. They both are sciences of the human being, both so-to-say ‘anthropologies;’ they both belong to psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy. This still is so in a time when the more narrow meanings of the medical terms ‘disease’ and ‘health’ have been expanded by the sociological point of view. Today, psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychotherapists are not satisfied with merely formulating theories. Increasingly, they ask about the sense and meaning of what is sick and has to be healed. To clear the relationship between body and soul, and to try to escape the blind alley of the dualistic way of looking upon life, they are forced to consult philosophers in order to perceive better the existence of the human being. Every attempt at explaining and acting of human beings, including the psychological and medical sciences, relies on presuppositions that are philosophical and pre-scientific.”

The question of note at this point, in my opinion, would be, to what extent is “the one-sided, natural-scientific orientation of psychiatry and psychotherapy” and its roots in a reliance upon, “presuppositions that are philosophical and pre-scientific” clouding the judgement that has psychiatry in the opinion of many forwarding a phamaceutical money-making agenda that is polarized and whose biobabble is more ideology than fact, more pseudo-science than exact science?

This polarized and increasingly-pathologizing point of of view that everything and anything to do with mental illness being a “brain disorder” or “brain disease” clearly serves no one, logically, but those in cohoots with pharma. It certainly isn’t about curing people now is it? After all, if people were cured, where would that leave the pharmaceutical companies and the psychiatrists invested in this new-age biopsychiatry? To say nothing of the fact that their entire premise fails to acknowledge the human spirit, the soul, the aspect of life that is not scientific or tangible and proven but that is faith-based and not subject to the advertised necessisity of medication intervention.

Psychiatry, psychotherapy, and their rigidly defined ideology of pathology do not have any authority or knowledge of the soul. To the extent that one is out of balance or off-center, who can really say that in each and every instance of that way of being everyone is the same and that the labels given can only be addressed by medication and then, according to the bible of psychiatry not even (usually) to any point of actual balance or return to center – recovery and healing. The biological argument of our time about mental illness is simply not a logical one. It is not a proven one. It could well be considered an unethical and corrupt misuse of trust, authority, and power.

In this month’s Lancet Medical Journal includes a very readable essay on the history of psychiatry written by Andrew Scull, who is a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego.

Susan Perry of Minnpost.com, offers this summary of Andrew Scull’s essay:  ”Scull talks about how psychiatry has revolutionized itself during the span of his career. The Freudian movement dominated the field through the 1960s — a period, he notes, when mental illnesses like schizophrenia were often attributed to such now discredited causes as the “refrigerator mother.”

Then, “more swiftly and silently than the Cheshire cat, psychoanalytic hegemony vanished,” writes Scull. Its replacement: drugs, the “new Holy Grail of the profession.”

But has this Holy Grail turned out to be yet another false icon? Here’s Scull’s scathing conclusion:

The US National Institute of Mental Health proclaimed the 1990s “the decade of the brain”. A simplistic biological reductionism increasingly ruled the psychiatric roost. Patients and their families learned to attribute mental illness to faulty brain biochemistry, defects of dopamine, or a shortage of seratonin. It was biobabble as deeply misleading and unscientific as the psychobabble it replaced, but as marketing copy it was priceless. Meantime, the psychiatric profession was seduced and bought off with boatloads of research funding. Where once shrinks had been the most marginal of medical men, existing in a twilight zone on the margins of professional respectability, now they were the darlings of medical school deans, the millions upon millions of their grants and indirect cost recoveries helping to finance the expansion of the medical-industrial complex.

And so to scandal. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and to a quite extraordinary extent, drug money has come to dominate psychiatry. It underwrites psychiatric journals and psychiatric conferences (where the omnipresence of pharmaceutical loot startles the naive outsider). It makes psychiatric careers, and many of those whose careers it fosters become shills for their paymasters, zealously promoting lucrative off-label uses for drugs whose initial approval for prescription was awarded on quite other grounds. It ensures that when scandals surface universities will mainly turn a blind eye to the transgressions of those members of their staff who engage in these unethical practices. And it controls psychiatric knowledge in multiple ways.

 

Read Scull’s Entire Essay 

 

© A.J. Mahari, April 15, 2010 – Except where others are quoted.

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p style=”text-align: justify;”>Author and Life Coach A.J. Mahari talks, in an episode of her Borderline Personality Disorder Inside Out Podcast, about the reality of focus and the importance of thinking outside the box. Is Borderline Personality Disorder really a “brain disease”? How does that account for the loss of authentic self in those with BPD that occurs do to abandonment?

What is the cause of BPD? Who knows? Does biopsychiatry really know? What do you believe? Can you get the whole story, all the information that you need from one source? Can accepting that BPD is a “brain disorder” negatively impact your ability to recover?

Too many people with BPD end up experiencing it as the sum total of who they know themselves to be. BPD is not, however, an identity. Where does that leave you?

The focus on BPD to date is largely one of unempowering those with BPD. It is a focus that increases feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. How is being in a narrow focus of the pathologizing of BPD helpful? Can it possibly be?  What’s the answer?

What will it benefit you most to focus on about BPD in order to empower yourself? What do you need to know to be able to get well? Is there a way to overcome the pathologizing of BPD that is way beyond stigma?

 LISTEN HERE

Just scroll down and look for this episode and you can also subscribe for free via iTunes

 

© A.J. Mahari, April 12, 2010 – All rights reserved.

 

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Whatever the source of information about mental illness what is becoming more clear to me is that not all professionals agree with what is now known as biopsychiatry. The problem with the argument being put forth by NAMI and biopsychiatry citing studies largely paid for by pharmaceutical companies that attempt to provide the proof for, you guessed it, why the mentally ill need to buy, buy, medications, is a confusing assertion that seems to be corrupting too many mental health care delivery systems. Is biopsychiatry a threat to traditional therapy?

What do you think?

Do you think to that mental health consumers are being mislead here, or not totally informed in a balanced way? People with mental illness have enough on their plates already and having to navigate this confusing mine field doesn’t help.

Is it ethical for advocacy organizations and mental health organizations to be funded by pharmaceutical companies? Why aren’t they more forthcoming and open about this? What’s being hidden?

How can you educate yourself?

I would recommend keeping an open mind and thinking about the ‘unwholly alliance’ of mental health advocacy and Pharma and studies that provide supposed evidence that mental illness is biological and therefore needs to be treated by drugs.

© A.J. Mahari, April 7, 2010

 

Please visit: mindfreedom.org

Below is an article from seatllepi.com

 

No proof mental illness rooted in biology

By KEITH HOELLER
GUEST COLUMNIST

What is “the mental health movement?” Its proponents claim that millions of Americans are afflicted with a mental illness, which is a disease “just like any other” and that the mentally ill suffer from a chemical imbalance in the brain that is corrected by psychiatric drugs.

Mental illness is said to be the cause of many of our society’s social ills, such as suicide, murder, divorce, child abuse, sex offenses, depression and various addictions. If only mental illness could be cured, mental health supporters say, all of these ills could be prevented.

Because the mentally ill often are unaware of their disease, treatment must be forced on the mentally ill. All 50 states have laws that allow involuntary treatment if professionals deem they are a danger to self and others.

Psychiatrists, we are told, can now accurately diagnose mental illness and have safe and effective treatments. Psychiatry is considered a valid medical specialty, like cardiology, and the claims of the movement are based on scientific research.

The largest lay group is the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI). The media routinely refer to NAMI as advocates for the mentally ill, although its membership consists almost entirely of family members and not the mentally ill themselves. NAMI ascribes to the “biological basis of mental illness,” and endorses forced treatment of the mentally ill.

The movement’s major source of funding is the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry, which funds the drug research; which funds psychiatric journals, and even the American Psychiatric Association itself; which funds advertising to doctors and the public; and even funds lay groups such as NAMI (at least $11 million) and Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder (at least $1 million).

Yet many professionals claim that the mental health movement is not a legitimate medical or scientific endeavor, let alone a civil rights movement, but a political ideology of intolerance and inhumanity. Numerous psychiatrists and psychologists have examined the psychiatric research literature and found it to range from smoke and mirrors to quackery.

Psychiatrists have yet to conclusively prove that a single mental illness has a biological or physical cause, or a genetic origin. Psychiatry has yet to develop a single physical test that can determine that an individual actually has a particular mental illness. Indeed, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders uses behavior, not physical symptoms, to diagnose mental illness, and it lacks both scientific reliability and validity.

On Aug. 16, eight members of MindFreedom (www.mindfreedom.org), an umbrella organization of mental patients who call themselves “psychiatric survivors,” began a Fast for Freedom “to press for human rights and choice in psychiatry” and to “demand that the mental health industry produce even one study proving the common industry claim that ‘mental illness is biologically-based.’ “

Dr. James Scully of the American Psychiatric Association responded to the hunger strikers by claiming the evidence was so vast one need only look at “Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General” (1999) or a recent psychiatry textbook.

An expert panel for the strikers, made up of members (like myself) of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (www.icspp.org), quickly responded by pointing out that neither of these works contains any such conclusive proof. Actually, the surgeon general’s report on mental health states that “the precise causes (etiology) of mental disorders are not known” and “there is no definitive lesion, laboratory test, or abnormality in brain tissue that can identify (a mental) illness.” The Textbook of Clinical Psychiatry (1999) states: ” … Validation of the diagnostic categories as specific entities has not been established.”

In its reply to the fasters, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill did not cite any scientific evidence at all.

In 1784, a similar debate raged in Paris about the scientific validity of the latest psychiatric nostrum (hypnotism) and its inventor, Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, who claimed to have discovered a physical mechanism he called animal magnetism. The Academy of Sciences formed a panel, including American scientist Benjamin Franklin and French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, to assess the movement sweeping the city, and concluded that Mesmer’s “cures” had no scientific basis. They were due entirely to the power of suggestion, now called the placebo effect. The Royal Society of Medicine issued a report with similar findings on Aug. 16, 1784.

Let us hope the Fast for Freedom has a positive outcome for all involved.

If not, let us insist that the American Medical Association (or similar body) form a panel of objective, non-psychiatric scientists, without any ties to drug companies, to examine whether psychiatry should continue as a medical specialty or if it should join the historical ranks of alchemy, astrology and phrenology as a pseudoscience.

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Is Borderline Personality Disorder really a “brain disorder”? Are you stuck with Borderline Personality Disorder? Life Coach and  BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, who herself recovered from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) 15 years ago speaks to the question of recovery from BPD in this audio program.

Do you feel like or believe that you can’t get better? That you won’t recover? Do you think BPD is a brain disorder and that means you will always have it? In this audio Life Coach and BPD Coach, A.J. Mahari, who recovered from BPD 15 years ago speaks the these question, “Am I stuck with BPD?” “Is it really possible to recover from BPD? Why don’t professionals describe what recovery is? Why don’t many professionals believe people with BPD can recover?

Borderline Personality Disorder is not only the most stigmatized mental illness, it is also the most pathologized. And it is not just the disorder that is pathologized. People with the disorder are often de-humanized by this pathologizing stigma and the attitude that others don’t want to work with them or that you can’t be helped if you have BPD. This compounds your shame. This can keep you stuck if you let it. Are you aware of what you are thinking? Are you aware of what you actually believe and why this is so important to getting unstuck and moving forward. This and so much more.

READ MORE …

© A.J. Mahari, March 29, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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