Archive for the ‘Biology of BPD’ Category
Need Some Help? How to Choose a Counselor
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 …
Psychiatric Oppression of Biopsychiatry – Interview with Dr. John Breeding Ph.D.
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.
Biopsychiatry – Mental Illness as “Brain Disease” – the major problem with modern psychiatry
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
Mind Brain Connection – Neuroplasticity of the Brain
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
Email This Post
From Psychobabble to Biobabble – Dr. Andrew Scull on "A Psychiatric Revolution"
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.”
- 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
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.
Email This Post
Borderline Personality Disorder – Focus and Thinking Outside The Box
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.
Email This Post
Is Mental Illness Rooted in Biology?
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.
Email This Post
Borderline Personality Disorder – Brain Disorder? Are You Stuck With It?
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.
© A.J. Mahari, March 29, 2010 – All rights reserved.
Email This Post
Mental Illness and The Brain – What’s Wrong with Psychiatry?
Mental illness - is it biological or isn’t? What do you think? I guess I’m a rebel at heart, someone who thinks outside of the box. I know in my own experience, having recovered 15 years from Borderline Personality Disorder, that along the way, on my journey, I had a psychiatrist tell me I wouldn’t get better until they developed some pill – I didn’t believe him. He wasn’t correct. I fired him on the spot after that comment. That was 1987. That was before this notion now forwarded that everything mental illness is a “brain disorder”. Professional in psychiatry are speaking out against the “status quo” of mental illness as a “brain disorder”.
This point of view of mine, born out of my own experience with and recovery from BPD is definately not the popular thinking these days. However, it is important for me to continue to get this message out and to have people really think about this. Too many people are just believing that mental illness, generally, and Borderline Personality Disorder, specifically are “brain disorders”. When one is not a psychiatrist it can feel like one does not have the right to say this. I’m over that now. This has to be challenged and I am very glad to see there are more professionals doing just that. This makes my forwarding my opinion and experience more credible in the face of what is an ever-proliferating blind acceptance, it seems to me, of BPD and mental illness being accepted as “brain disorders”. There is a difference between realizing a role of biology in BPD and calling it a “brain disorder”.
Please also reference my Blog Post from December 2009 Biopsychiatry – Pharma Funded Scam – NAMI?
This psychiatric forwarding of mental illness as a “brain disorder” is where the money is. It has behind it pharmaceutical companies who no doubt fund the studies that come back with the “brain disease” so-called proof. It just seems to me that the trail between the money-grab of the pharmaceutical companies and these studies isn’t a very long one. Then, there are the psychiatrists on this gravey train for financial gain. All I can say is that if I needed therapy today I would not let any of these “biological – brain disease” believing psychiatrists anywhere near me. This was also the decision I made in 1987.
In the case of Borderline Personality Disorder, it is important to keep an open mind, in my opinion, only in so far as that there is likely a biological component that is mixed with the psychological one. Having said that, I do not believe it is a major factor. And, there is now plenty of literature, books etc., out there about the fact that the brain has more plasticity then was thought. This means that the biological aspect of BPD is not a hinderance to recovery. And, I’ll stress here again, I recovered and was NEVER on any psychiatric medication.
Each person needs to make up his or her own mind about what he or she thinks about this. I just think it’s important that I take a stand on this, as unpopular as that is in the Mental Health community at large and the BPD Community more specifically. I applaud Dr. McLaren for his video and the other professionals quoted below. As I see it, we are all very fortunate when professionals break rank with agenda-driven rhetoric that really can be seen as an abuse of the power and trust of the profession of psychiatry on the part of those who forward the mental illness = “brain disorder”. If you have BPD and are on the meds or have taken the meds, you likely know first-hand they aren’t the answer. I’ve yet to hear from anyone with BPD who felt they recovered or were cured by these meds. Having said, that, please, if you are on medication, please do not stop taking it without consulting your doctor. If your doctor believes this all-biological argument you might want to think about finding a doctor with an open mind.
Dr. Niall McLaren, an Australian practicing psychiatrist for 22 years, explains what is wrong with the psychiatric profession: That it cannot/will not take criticism, for fear the entire model of biological psychiatry will unravel. That there is no science to psychiatric diagnoses, no brain based diseases. And that psychiatry only pushes mental disorders as biological disease in order to convince people to take psychiatric drugs, causing a host of dangerous side effects.
Please also reference my Blog Post from December 2009 Biopsychiatry – Pharma Funded Scam – NAMI?
Psychiatrists, Physicians & Psychologists on the lack of medical/scientific test to verify mental disorders as a “disease” or medical condition
“…modern psychiatry has yet to convincingly prove the genetic/biologic cause of any single mental illness…Patients [have] been diagnosed with ‘chemical imbalances’ despite the fact that no test exists to support such a claim, and…there is no real conception of what a correct chemical balance would look like.”
“There’s no biological imbalance. When people come to me and they say, ‘I have a biochemical imbalance,’ I say, ‘Show me your lab tests.’ There are no lab tests. So what’s the biochemical imbalance?”
“DSM-IV is the fabrication upon which psychiatry seeks acceptance by medicine in general. Insiders know it is more a political than scientific document… DSM-IV has become a bible and a money making bestseller—its major failings notwithstanding.”
“All psychiatrists have in common that when they are caught on camera or on microphone, they cower and admit that there are no such things as chemical imbalances/diseases, or examinations or tests for them. What they do in practice, lying in every instance, abrogating [revoking] the informed consent right of every patient and poisoning them in the name of ‘treatment’ is nothing short of criminal.”
“Psychiatry makes unproven claims that depression, bipolar illness, anxiety, alcoholism and a host of other disorders are in fact primarily biologic and probably genetic in origin…This kind of faith in science and progress is staggering, not to mention naïve and perhaps delusional.”
“In short, the whole business of creating psychiatric categories of ‘disease,’ formalizing them with consensus, and subsequently ascribing diagnostic codes to them, which in turn leads to their use for insurance billing, is nothing but an extended racket furnishing psychiatry a pseudo-scientific aura. The perpetrators are, of course, feeding at the public trough.”
Royal College of Physicians of the UK
“I believe, until the public and psychiatry itself see that DSM labels are not only useless as medical ‘diagnoses’ but also have the potential to do great harm—particularly when they are used as means to deny individual freedoms, or as weapons by psychiatrists acting as hired guns for the legal system.”
“The way things get into the DSM is not based on blood test or brain scan or physical findings. It’s based on descriptions of behavior. And that’s what the whole psychiatry system is.”
“No biochemical, neurological, or genetic markers have been found for Attention Deficit Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Depression, Schizophrenia, anxiety, compulsive alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, gambling or any other so-called mental illness, disease, or disorder.”
author of Commonsense Rebellion
“Unlike medical diagnoses that convey a probable cause, appropriate treatment and likely prognosis, the disorders listed in DSM-IV [and ICD-10] are terms arrived at through peer consensus.”
Source of above quotes: http://3.ly/4kp
© A.J. Mahari, March 28, 2010 – Except for the above quotes and video copyright of the above individuals.
Biology of Borderline Personality Does Not Impede Ability to Recover
There are still many conflicting theories about the origin and cause or causes of Borderline Personality Disorder. There are some who lean toward theories that are still reflect the dualistic causation of nature and nurture. There are others who would still forward that Borderline Personality Disorder is caused by lack of nuture and lack of secure attachment. The biopsychological theories, citing evidence of imaging and various physical tests, purport that Borderline Personality Disorder has, at the very least, some neurobiological underpinnings. Some have labelled this as meaning that BPD is a “brain disorder”, a result of deficits or damage to the hard-wiring of the brain. This leads many with BPD to feel hopeless about recovery. However, just as more is being discovered about the biology of BPD – which still doesn’t rule out aspects of lack of attachment and nurture – so too are professionals discovering that the brain has much more plasticity that was previously thought.
“A second theme in the literature on borderline personality concerns etiology. Once again there have been two distinct views. The first, popular among psychotherapists and many early psychoanalytic thinkers, emphasized early experience—pre-oedipal and separation-individuation were common terms. Parental care had been unempathic, there had been traumatic experiences, the mother-child “match” was poor, etc. A second theme, popular among psychiatric researchers, emphasized constitutional factors—genetic links to bipolar or affective disease, temperamental characteristics such as impulsivity or affective dysregulation, brain abnormalities, etc. Currently there have been several efforts to meld these two perspectives, as is occurring in other areas of psychiatry. Parents who may have little difficulty raising a temperamentally well-modulated infant may face major challenges with a dysregulated one, with unempathic and traumatic interactions resulting. Endogenous affective storms may interfere with the normal development of internalized object relations. In sum, development is complicated, always involves the interaction of nature and nurture, and although in extreme cases one or the other may predominate as the determinant of pathology, there is much more likely to be a complex interaction when the outcome is less extreme—that is, borderline..” (1)
Abandonment and Borderline Personality Disorder
The Shame of Abandonment in Borderline Personality Disorder
Breaking Free From the BPD Maze – Recovery For Loved Ones
Brain plasticity refers to the reality that the brain can change. While science and technology are now making it possible for professionals to understand more about brain differences in those with BPD, I am not aware that they can say why those differences are as they are. I also continue to wonder what came first, the chicken – abandonment trauma that affects the brain physically – or the egg – the results of the change in thinking or behavior and the now being noted changes in the brain. What I mean by this is that it has been established that psychological trauma, such as abandonment, whether it is perceived or actual can and does change the physical brain. This is where I still see some potential over-lap in the causation of BPD – in it being caused by lack of nurture and environmental factors that do effect the brain and lead to arrested emotional development. I guess, in my non-professional understanding of much that I’ve read it seems to me that it does still make sense that what science is figuring out now doesn’t necessarily change the impact and accuracy of object relations theory, for example, which I talk about in my ebook, The Legacy of Abandonment in Borderline Personality Disorder. It is important to note, if you have BPD, that you can get better, you can recover. I have. And neuro-biological psychatric findings really do not change this at all, in fact, they support this.
- Purchase all 3 of ebooks for NON BORDERLINES or 3 Non Borderline Ebooks packaged together with audio.
- 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
“It is interesting that, although we now recognize the importance of heritable risk factors predisposing a patient to develop borderline personality disorder, the evidence based core treatment recommended for this disorder is psychotherapy, an intervention long thought to change the mind but not necessarily the brain. Ironically, we also now understand that intensive psychotherapy is a form of long-term learning and memory, which indeed changes the brain. Psychotherapy is thus, at least in part, a biological treatment. But one important emphasis here is the reference to ‘long-term’.” (2)
Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder needs to be available to people with BPD in long term ways. This is because, that among all else being addressed in therapy on the journey of recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder, as John M. Oldham writes above, one of the crucial goals in therapy and in the changing of patterns of thoughts and the neuro-pathways in the brain that have long-supported negative all-or-nothing, black-and-white, cognitively distorted ways of thinking. It is the reality that this effort can and will change at a brain level. For that to happen, however, this learning and creation of new neuro-pathways, memory circuts so to speak, in the brain does take time and reinforcement.
“The good news to underscore, during this Congressionally established Borderline Personality Disorder Awareness Month, is that many treatments have now been demonstrated to be effective for patients with borderline personality disorder. This optimistic state of affairs situates us very far along from the discouraging early days of borderline personality disorder’s diagnostic arrival.” (3)









