Commentary on the Tao Te Ching, verse 48

Today I am going to try my hand at commenting on the Tao Te Ching, specifically verse 48. To be totally frank right away–I do not consider myself a Tao scholar. I am way behind on the traditional Taoist Canon. I wouldn’t begin to comment on I Ching. I don’t pretend to be able to comment on the entirety of the Tao Te Ching.

I don’t study it for purposes of inspiration or revelation—as such. I just browse it periodically and realize the chapters are talking about the stuff I find comes up in practice. So my thoughts are from a sit-and-meditate point of view, not philosophical or ideological. Thus, to my perspective, verse 48 is a kind of codified set of instructions and observations.

–Learning consist of daily accumulating–

Every day we go through life sensing, seeing, hearing, smelling and learning trivia. We read books and articles. We gain experiences. We socialize and learn new things and think about them.

These thoughts on these transient things adds to the volume of ‘stuff’ and ‘noise’ in your mind that is essentially pure thought and contemplation. It is the firing of your frontal lobe neurons as you cogitate the meaning of life and what you absorb. In this way, you are always, always accumulating unless you do something very very deliberate about it.

–The practice of the Tao consist of daily diminishing–

If we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by the dialogue and data-stream in our minds–if we do not allow the mind to jump incessantly from one chain of associations to another–we can begin to simply stop (or at least slow down) the additive process of constant ‘thinking’ and ‘knowing’ about more and more things.

In terms of practice, it can simply mean doing some meditation instead of watching the news. Going for a Zen walk instead of blogging or reading Fark or zoning out on your Wii.

–Decreasing and decreasing, until doing nothing–

This simply is the next logical step. You literally put the brakes on your life, suspend ‘trying to have a life’ and replacing it with simply ‘being’. It specifically means doing prolonged sitting meditation and reaching the event horizon in your mind where, you’ve stopped adding to what you ‘know’ and are simply seeing what ‘is’ floating around inside you.

–When nothing is done, nothing is left undone–

This simply means that when the mind is still, it has no desire to jump around. It simply is. It also can refer to being on vacation, literally from life. Being a bum. Having no responsibilities, no commitments, no politics, no socializing, just being content being by yourself in the woods communing with the energy of the sky and trees and the earth.

In means sidestepping the rat race of consumerism and seeing that it IS a rat race that keeps people from self-actualization.

–True mastery can be gained–

True mastery is what obviously? Self-mastery. It’s repeated again and again in TTC. Know thyself and know the ways of the world. It means  mastery of our inner world. A respite from unrelenting mental dialogue, personal demons, and emotional, moral, or existential conflicts

–By letting things go their own way–

It means stop being a control freak, relax, let go, and be. It is a direct reference to doing some sitting time in the woods or on a mountaintop and letting the Emperors and Masters of the Universe do their thing, while you remain unattached. In the tradition that I practice that also means dissolving through the first four Bodies of Being.

–It cannot be gained by interfering–

Stop trying to make sense of life. Stop relying on selective thinking. Stop trying to control life. Stop trying to find meaning in life. Stop endlessly analyzing everything that happens around you. Relax, surrender, allow–and it will unfold on its own. Whether it is inner peace or spiritual realizations or the events of life itself.

Interference means also, that if you are projecting thoughts and cogitating, you are getting in your own way and you are not meditating or on the path to stillness, because stillness is what happens when you stop making and start allowing. It blossoms. It grows like a bacterial culture and reaches a flash point and starts transforming your inner landscape.

Anyway, those are some thoughts I had about certain elements of verse 48 of the Tao Te Ching and the reader is  certainly free to absorb or discard the comments as they see fit. There was no attempt on my part to come across as definite or authoritative, these were just my opinions–take them in the spirit that they are written.

Mad in America, a review

On the heels of my review of ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’, here is a review of ‘Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill’ by medical journalist Robert Whitaker.

Mad in America by Robert Whitaker is the history of the failed science and enduring mistreatment of people with mental illness. This book, along with ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’, helped me understand what happened to me when I made the tragic mistake one day of asking for help for my problems and I entered a mental hospital to get treatment.

We read about the earliest days of psychiatry when patients were chained to walls, starved, bled, beaten and it was genuinely believed to be good treatment for them. We are introduced to the Tranquilizer chair, ice baths and organ and gland surgeries performed to cure madness.

Then the war on the mentally ill kicks into high gear with the onslaught of eugenics, forced sterilizations, forced electroshock and on and on. It was the consensus from the early to mid 1900s that the mentally ill were basically defective and therefor unfit to breed. Thus involuntary treatments, brutal mishandling and torture were the name of the game. The right of consent to treatment did not exist.

The mentally ill were rounded up, packed into institutions resulting in gross over-crowding and the lack of funds meant they were neither looked after nor were their comfort needs addressed and they languished in these so-called hospitals for years.

During the worst of these times, when your number was up to be treated and the orderlies came for you, if you resisted you would be beaten and choked or otherwise knocked unconscious, whisked into the operating theater for some electroshock to ‘shake loose the pattern in the brain’ and then an icepick would be driven through your eye socket and wiggled around, shredding connections in your frontal lobes.

This was seen as perfectly acceptable and state-of-the-art medical care less than a hundred years ago. Psychiatrists wrote up scientific papers and congratulated themselves and each other on the thousands of people who had been subjected to this treatment unwillingly (for their own good of course) and they boasted of the amazing and permanent changes in personality these therapies created.

In part three Whitaker explains how the rise of modern chemistry offered psychiatrists a simple, comparatively inexpensive and more controllable form of brain damage that offered a similar relief of symptoms the insulin coma, beatings, electroshock and general abuse accomplished previously.

Under the effects of the chemical lobotomy patients became helpless, submissive, disoriented, forgetful and altogether much easier to handle then they were before treatment. Under the effects of chemical ‘restraints’ patients could be allowed out of or even released from mental hospitals and psychiatrists congratulated themselves again on making great strides in the care of the mentally ill.

Part four is short and sweet. Surprise, Big Pharma lied through its collective teeth about the atypical antipsychotics. Not only were the new ones just as bad as the old ones, but now you can get diabetes in addition to all the other wonderful debilitating side effects.

Scientists did some studies on the brains of macaques with a control group receiving a placebo and one group receiving haldol and the other group receiving zyprexa and not too surprisingly, six months later, the neuroleptic treated monkeys had brain damage. Pockets of interstitial fluid filled up spaces where healthy ganglion formerly existed.

Antipsychotics aka neuroleptics, are pesticides. Most neuroleptics are analogs of phenothiazines and may or may not have a piperazine in their chain. If you want to know how a bug feels when it is treated with antipsychotics, go to youtube, look up videos on Tardive Dyskinesia and imagine experiencing that 1000 times worse. What Big Pharma does, is dilute that industrial toxin and tweak the molecule around a little and sell it as a treatment for mental illness. Even the name ‘anti-psychotic’ is misleading since it sounds like the makers of the drug actually understand the process of psychosis and cleverly designed these drugs to address a specific imbalance.

I find it very telling that deep inside, far to the bottom of the full data sheets on some of the neuroleptics you will sometimes find a cautionary note: ‘Do not allow the liquid version of this drug to come into contact with clothing.’ Doesn’t say why, just says don’t. Phenothiazines had their very early origins as a component used in dyes. So why would liquid thorazine or trilafon be bad if it is spilled onto your clothes unless it would start messing with dye in the fibers? It’s an absolute deception that the phenothiazines used in dyes and de-worming agents are all that different from neuroleptics aka ‘nerve clamps’ served up to the mentally ill.

The story we are told is that neuroleptics are pretty much the best, most modern and humane treatment available for schizophrenics. When you try to make people understand that antipsychotics are poisons that cause brain damage and create chemical imbalances, they freak out because of the sheer cognitive dissonance. They know someone or they are someone who has used these chemicals to quell delusions or deal with psychosis and you are saying some really ugly things about their successful treatment.

The general consensus among the haters of this book is that without antipsychotics there really wouldn’t be any treatment for schizophrenia aside from mechanical or electrical brain damage. Thus, this book is bad for shaking up their faith in their own treatment and forcing them to really examine what it is they are doing to themselves over the long term. That is a deeply personal thing but it’s not a reason to hate or flunk or condemn this book. Getting mad at the messenger for carrying the message is, I think, a bit unreasonable. The people you should be mad at work in the pharmaceutical industry and made the drug that is even now making unnatural changes to your brain.

I was once involuntarily treated with a drug called Trilafon that quickly turned me into a befuddled, trembling, drooling, forgetful, situationally unaware, parch-mouthed obese vegetable and I was not allowed to say no. It was not until I turned fifteen and learned that I had just reached the age of refusal of consent to medical treatment when I finally got off that mindwipe in a bottle.

There are other treatments besides psychotropic drugs and no one ever told me about them or offered them to me. With Mosher’s Soteria House, people were allowed to be unmedicated and weird but they were left alone or encouraged to be social as they saw fit and this resulted in many lasting medication-free recoveries. Mosher’s concepts of humane, interpersonal care was not at all a new idea. Back in part one, Whitaker tells us about the Quaker-style retreats in the mid 1800s modeled after the York House.

The Quakers espoused the idea of ‘moral treatment’. They ignored the prevailing medical model of mental illness at the time in favor of treating a person as a person. They recognized that people with ‘nervous disorders’ were stressed and what they really needed was rest and a break from life. America also once sported these moral treatment asylums and not long before the specter of eugenics darkened psychiatry’s doorstep, they were boasting 50%, 60% even 80% recovery rates of previously disturbed patients in one years’ time. Sure, there was always some hard cases, people who never got better, but once upon a time people recognized that schizophrenics and manic depressives could and many did actually recover without drugs or other brain damaging processes.

Electroshock and lobotomies never went away. In fact, ever since Patty Duke came forward about her electroshock there has been something of a quiet renaissance in the treatment. Apparently the use of sedatives before the cattle prod is applied to the head makes the procedure more ‘humane’. Meanwhile, Mass General reportedly performed fifteen lobotomies in 2001 and there were another hundred or so that same year documented throughout Europe. In the case of the lobotomizers, they have since upgraded from stabbing your brain with an ice pick to painting lesions with a tiny soldering iron. High-tech stuff if you believe them.

To this day they are still mistreating those with mental illness or even suspected of being mentally ill. This is especially the case in places like Florida with their Baker Act that allows a cop to come to your home, forcibly seize and deliver you in handcuffs to a Baker Act receiving facility for processing and summary treatment. Simply because your mum, uncle or recently estranged boyfriend can call emergency services and makes up any story they want about your behavior and if they sound both concerned and convincing you can find your civil rights along with your ability to refuse consent to treatment suspended real fast.

In the final analysis, Mad in America shows that psychiatry is the emperor with no clothes. Psychiatrists don’t have any special insight into how the brain works. Right now, it’s all about genetics and their completely disproved chemical imbalance nonsense. It’s the dispensing of ‘anti-this’ and ‘anti-that’ drugs for mental ‘disease’ that makes psychiatry a ‘real’ medical science.

Bottom line: If you are not willing to lie down for some electroshock or submit to medication roulette, the truth is, there is nothing psychiatry can do for you. Nothing. And they don’t like to admit it. That they paid for med school and the extra pharmacy education and yet their services are not needed to achieve a real mental recovery and their treatments cause more problems and quality of life issues than they mitigate. The four-point restraints, quiet rooms and chemical lobotomies that we still use today demonstrate that very little in the way of real progress has actually been made in the understanding and humane treatment of, those with real (or even perceived) mental illness.

I highly recommend ‘Mad in America’. Read the macabre details of early psychiatry and today’s treatments and ask yourself, are we really treating the mentally ill all that much better now? What science do we have that explains what psychosis really is? How is using pesticide agents proven to reduce brain volume over time, a humane treatment? It’s a severe wake-up call and should be read by caregiver, counselor and consumer alike.

Great Whites and New Planets

I check out Surfpulse blog for local goings-on and discovered this fantastic footage of a beautiful adolescent great white shark. The footage was taken recently by a water sports man by the name of Chuck Patterson. Chuck was Stand Up Paddle surfing off of San Onofre State Beach and had a very close encounter with a eight or nine foot carcharodon carcharius-a great white shark.

San Onofre is almost five hundred miles away from Ocean Beach and both are within what is called ‘The Red Triangle.’ Tagged Great Whites have been detected moseying about the San Francisco Bay on occasion. I have long had an obsession about great white sharks—ever since I saw the nightmarish cover of Peter Benchley’s ‘Jaws’ at a neighborhood garage sale when I was a child.

There is a small part of me that would very much love to be in the water with one sometime. To see it—to know it sees me—and to swim, paddle, or surf away from it to tell the tale. One of those ‘conquering your fears by facing them’ type things. And why not–it happens more than you might think–it happened a week ago and in May–a hundred yards out from Ocean Beach. The truth is—I think they are lovely. They look like underwater space ships. I am a huge GWS nerd and I know tons of completely pointless trivia about them.

I know from research for example—that the great whites that favor the Northwest coast and the Farallons are a genetically distinct population from Australian and South African great whites. Great whites are an apex predator that have no fear of anything and whose only natural enemies really are orcas, us humans and the occasional dolphin pod. They are pretty intelligent for a fish and they have a huge brain—with about 70% of it dedicated to interpreting sensory data.

They have no way to explore or handle things they encounter in the water they are curious about—except to bump, nose or bite it—to see how it reacts and determine it’s qualities. Their frightening mouth is their hand that they use to grip, taste and test things. We count as objects of curiosity worth investigating
to a GWS and when they do an exploratory ‘nibble’ on one of us—it can separate a limb from the torso. It’s not like they mean to—they are just curious and it’s hard to be delicate or gentle when you weigh one or two tons and have a mouth full of steak knives.

I like water sports. Although I haven’t had the time or the money to spend indiscriminately on developing those interests into full-grown hobbies in recent years— I’d like to. Ocean Beach is a short walk away from me. So I could go paddleboarding, or shortboarding or parasailing like a lot of OB locals. But of all the non-diving related water or surf sports that exist, stand-up paddle surfing sounds like the one I would try. Chuck sums up the allure of SUP surfing very compellingly,

“The sport of stand up paddling gives you such a great view of marine life as you stand on top of your board paddling through the oceans and lakes. I think that is one of the most intriguing beauties that makes stand up paddling so inviting.–You are your own captain of your ship, exploring the waters of the world.”

And from the video, you can clearly see that the lovely shark scoping out Chuck just wanted to see what’s SUP! Ask me sometime about my other favorite ocean life—most of them hazardous to your health. HP reported it along with the news of a few 12-14 foot great whites visiting one of my old haunts–Salisbury Beach in Massachusetts.

In other news, scientists have found the smallest planets yet. At least five Neptune-like planets are circling a yellow Sol-type distant star called HD10180. Among those gas giants is a cold, rocky planet French Astronomers believe to be merely 1.4 times the size of Earth. This is exciting due to the statistical numbers game. There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone. It means its not only likely that there exist many multi-planetary solar systems orbiting stars like ours—its probably inevitable at this point—that they will discover a green or blue world in the Goldilocks Zone—not too close—not too far—from the sun. Enough for water and bacteria and possibly life—and who knows what else.

Maybe we will find an algae covered planet stewing in a shallow ocean. Maybe we will find  Paleozoic Planet sporting dragonfly-like insects with two-foot wings. Maybe will find intelligent life forms evolving their way up the ladder to civilization. Who knows. But I am very exited. When I was very young I wanted to be an astronomer like Copernicus or Carl Sagan’s ‘Eleanor Arroway’ from the book (and later movie) ‘Contact’. But unfortunately astronomy is pretty math-intensive and my math, frankly, sucks.

Astronomy is in the middle of a renaissance right now. They detect planets by the gravity perturbations on the star(s) they orbit–which creates wobbles in the light coming from the them. They’ve discovered the universe is simply littered with millions of galaxies. At the heart of every spiral and elliptical galaxy (including ours) lies a supermassive black hole that literally is holding the galaxy together with its power as it wanders the universe like a whirlpool in the ocean.

Their technology and science has led to the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and soon they will loft the James Webb Space Telescope which will be able to gaze into the beginnings of galaxy formation in the early days of the Universe.

In my dreams I see our robotic probes streaking at near-relativistic speeds towards the almost five hundred planetary systems that have been detected in the last fifteen years. Those robots will disgorge nanomachine builders which will create factories like hummingbirds that will suckle the volatile gases of these giant planets—converting the elements into building materials that will create our orbital colonies that we will inhabit while other Builders terraform the habitable planet nearby. While those Builders build our new homes—some of us will be asleep in cryostasis in a deep-range colony ship headed towards those planets on the blue vapors of ion drives. And in my dreams—I am one of those sleeping colonists who will someday wake up and live on a new world–far, far away.

http://www.sandiego.org/article_set/Visitors/5/27

New study reveals link between depression and being alive

New study reveals strong links between depression and being alive.

A recent meta analysis of thousands of cases of people with depression spanning decades has concluded that life causes depression.

It appears that humans are susceptible to varying states of depression for a myriad of reasons.

Anything from wars, natural disasters and politics to personal, financial or family loss and even individuals illness and impairment all have been linked to depression.

These findings clearly indicate the underlying cause of most forms of depression basically amounts to stress in all it’s manifest forms.

There is only so much stress people can take in their lives before the effects of the stress causes changes in the affects of the stressed victim.

Not everyone is built equally in terms of what levels of stress they can take before depression strikes.

One woman’s story is a classic example of this.

“It took me literally years to face the fact that I was depressed and had been for some time. I work 70 hours a week in a high pressure job, my husband is deployed in a war zone. Both my kids have problems. My daughter came down with bipolar at 7 and my son was diagnosed with adhd at age 6. I never get enough sleep, I am always the one dealing with everything. I can never find personal time for myself. It feels like I work for everyone in my life. I began to feel burned out, burned out at everything going on at once every day with no breaks no time off for myself. I was handling it all fine for years then one day I realized I was depressed. I did not think it could happen to me.

Now take my mother for example. She lives with us. She gets up in the morning, takes her coffee and watches tv for two hours. She gets all her information about the world from the Tv. By the second hour she is on the vodka and after two hours of watching tv, seeing and listening to what is going on everywhere in the world, she just crawls back to bed for the rest of the day. She has been like that for years.”

When we interviewed a top depression researcher he had this to say about the strong links between being alive, living a life with unavoidable stresses and the onset of depression.

“Our research indicates that the depression response is hardwired into our genetic makeup. People get stressed [over life events] and they get depressed. It is a weakness coded in the DNA.

We are working hard to find a permanent cure. It is only a matter of time before we develop drugs which specifically target those genes responsible for causing depression and remove them.”

Asked what it would be like to be incapable of depression for the rest of one’s life one scientist had this to say.

“It would be a good thing I think (not being depressed, again, ever ) I mean in today’s world, really who has time to be depressed? If no one were ever depressed it would mean less time missed from work and school. Less money spent in various therapies and interventions. You would have more productivity across the board in every walk of life of those effected by treatment. I mean if a close relative in a family died we expect that the entire family could be moved to depression. That one event could cause a ripple effect. From a performance drop in the kids at school to the parent’s performance in the workplace. Who has time for that anymore? Of what possible good could come from an entire family that was depressed?

We think that is totally avoidable. What we want to do is be able to prevent those performance drops from happening. This would be a good thing for us as a nation, as a people.

Once our parent pharmaceutical company that provided all our research money maintains a patent lock on our genetic depression treatment pill and has made untold billions off of saving Americans from the effects of life itself. We could export this cure to the rest of the world. We need merely look around and we can find depressing things happening to people in all corners of the world.

There are people living lives of squalor and famine or people in strongly polluted, destroyed or war torn areas that could all benefit from a permanent cure for depression in the form of the generic version. As long as the people of the world keep having children, we would continue to have a need to manufacture our cure.”

I posted this on my old blog in 2008. Thought it could use a dust-off.

The myth of the bipolar child

Everything about the current politics of child and pediatric bipolar disorder.

• The bipolar child.
• Bipolar child psych docs at war.
• Bipolar child researcher says BP doesn’t exist in children.
• The doping of America’s foster kids.
• Eli Lilly Co behind the bipolar child research in order to find new drug markets for moodstabilizers and neuroleptics—lots of $$$ involved for research doctors who can prove it exists.
• Bipolar child mafia

For what it’s worth–I was a ‘bipolar child’ myself. I got the diagnosis over ten years before Janice and Demitri Papolos authored: ‘The Bipolar Child: The Definitive and Reassuring Guide to Childhood’s Most Misunderstood Disorder’. At the time–the late 1980s–it was ultra-rare for a child or teen to have or be diagnosed with–bipolar or manic depression. In The Eighties, bipolar disorder was seen as an adult illness. In all likelihood, I was a ‘bipolar child’ before there were bipolar children in the media and Harvard research papers.

The neuroscience Big Pharma is funding seems to implicate that an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex is what causes a ‘bipolar child’ (or adult for that matter). I would point out—that all children have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. There is no way around it due to maturity and development. And what is maturity and development? It’s the growth of new neurons and connections in the brain—permanent ones—that influence our moods and judgments. So—all children– technically have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex in their brain. At least for a little while.

I have yet to see any studies that prove that a bipolar child’s prefrontal cortex is significantly less developed than any other child’s. Even if it was so–it does not mean it’s a lifer condition–it could just be a little delayed compared to other children in the same age group. Because–slow or fast–the prefrontal cortex develops continually over the course of your entire life with every impulse you deny and every emotion you restrain.

What this means is that the process of normal maturity will cause the prefrontal cortex to develop on it’s own. That is—the very act of trying to control your own moods and thoughts—is what creates a developed prefrontal lobe. Interestingly—science has recently proven using brain scans and imagery–that practitioners of meditation take prefrontal cortex development to a whole new level. So, a meditator can cause their prefrontal cortex to become highly developed—more so even—than people who do not practice meditation.

It took me merely five years to get my manic impulses, irrational screaming rages, depressions and suicide attempts straightened out by dedicating myself to the daily practice of prefrontal lobe-strengthening exercises–meditation. If you blame your moods and thoughts on your brain, genes, or neurotransmitters—and all you ever do to cope is medicate with psych meds—at what point do you start taking control of your own internal world—and all its contents—and begin to grow a prefrontal cortex capable of handling normal life?

The PC bipolar crowd resists any attempt to ‘blame’ yourself for your own emotional and thought problems. Some bipolar disorder patients will condemn you for essentially saying,

“You really can do something about your mental health by exerting mental will.”

“It’s the bipolar disease influencing us—we don’t have insight into our behavior! How dare you imply we can use magical thinking to control a genetic disorder?”

–is usually the standard-issue rebuttal.

Well…have you ever tried Vipassana—insight meditation—to get some insight? How often do you practice–getting insight? When was the last time you tried zen or mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy? With the studies I have shown you below, it should be clear that meditation is very much an act of will and insight that has been proven—to alter, strengthen and improve—the very section of your brain that Big Pharma neuroscientists are blaming for your problems.

Why are you blaming your genes and chemical imbalances? Why waste time complaining about your lack of insight or control over your symptoms—when you could be actively working on remedying that? Perhaps you didn’t know you could. That’s fair. But here in this post is the information you require to see yourself as potentially having control over your mind and emotions. Through what amounts to a lot of hard work—that could very well save you–as it did me–from a lifetime of disability and awful polypharmacy treatments and their side effects.

• Meditation is a way of tapping into a process of manipulating brain activity
• Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better — and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.
• Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.
• “Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School
• New imaging technology makes it possible for scientists to document the brain activity of Buddhist monks. Dalai Lama visits MIT
• In recent years, a group of neuroscientists are exploring the hypothesis that meditation can actually change the way the brain works.
• Scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison used new scanning techniques to examine brain activity in a group of Buddhists.Their tests revealed activity in the left prefrontal lobes of experienced Buddhist practitioners.This area is linked to positive emotions, self-control and temperament.Their tests showed this area of the Buddhists’ brains are constantly lit up and not just when they are meditating.
• Medical effects of meditation.

If I got the chance, I would happily testify at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association or the Senate regarding my concerns about the current ‘pediatric bipolar’ diagnosing trend in America, and the crime against children that I think it represents. I would love to share my insights into long-term bipolar disorder outcomes, alternative treatments for it, and the science of meditation and brain development behind my own self-cure from a former ‘bipolar child’ perspective. If you can arrange that, shoot me an email.

Truehope or Truehype? An analysis of EMpower

This is a long article, so fair warning. I had never heard of Truehope until the last couple of years. I learned of it from videos and comments on Youtube. I’ve never tried it either. The window of opportunity when that might have interested me came and went a decade ago. Nevertheless people continue to ask my opinions about it so here you go.

During my early twenties I read some books by Dr. Andrew Weil and became interested in nutrition. My first vitamins I ever tried as an adult were these UltraMultiPak vitamins you find on the counter by the register at convenience stores and gas stations. Later on I became more discerning and discriminating about supplements and tried all kinds of different formulas.

Truly I felt better when I started taking them. I worked a lot of hours back then doing hard physical labor. I smoked and consumed caffeinated and sugared beverage all day. I did a lot of drugs.

When you live like that you can very well become ‘deficient’ and taking a Flintstones kids vitamin, a Centrum Silver for seniors or even a prenatal multivitamin can help you bear the load of bad habits, indulgence and heavy toxicity. You have more endurance and sleep better when you take a multivitamin and have a stressful, toxic lifestyle.

I tried all kinds of herbs like ginseng, dong quai, black cohosh, ginko biloba, valerian root, lavender, St John’s wort. I’ve tried all sorts of stuff like: fish oil, DHEA, pregnenalone, L-triptophan, phenylanaline and melatonin. I jumped on the supplement wagon with both feet right away. In my opinion, supplements can very useful and helpful.

Now let’s take a look at Truehope.  When I first heard about it somebody came to one of my videos and completely off topic leaves the comment “Try Truehope, it cures bipolar.” Honestly after my experiences in healing my own mental health issues and considering the years of hard work and trial and error, I was immediately and rightfully skeptical. That’s what caused me to take a look at the Truehope/EMpower videos on YT.

Let us now take a moment to examine the underlying back story behind Empower.

The story involves a conversation between two Canadian Mormons, Anthony Stephen and David Hardy. The story goes something like this. Mr Stephen, a property manager was complaining to his fellow church goer Mr Hardy about his children’s behavior. Namely some symptoms of ADD and some manic components of bipolar. Mr Hardy, whose experience as a cattle feed salesman informed him, stated that some of these behaviors sounded similar to a condition that occurs to domestic pig farms, Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome.

Mr Hardy offered up that information that introducing vitamins and minerals into pig food seemed to clear up ETBS. Some theorycrafting between the two of these men soon resulted with the conclusion that by introducing vitamins and minerals to Mr Stephen’s children that the human version of Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome might just clear up and what did he have to lose but to try?

Unfortunately, Mr Hardy failed to mention that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever which indicates that ETBS is caused by mineral or vitamin deficiency. In fact, what production pig farmers have found is that ETBS was remedied by changing the taste of the pig feed, by adding or removing pigs from the population and giving pigs toys to play with.

The consensus among production pig farmers is that boredom seems to be the most likely cause of ETBS and shaking up the pigs routine with new stimulus seems to clear ETBS up promptly. Pigs are smart, curious and exploratory. If I was doing time in a pig pen with nothing to interest me I might get irritable too. It makes sense that ETBS is not really a syndrome per se but a pig social and behavioral problem resulting from confinement that clears up for awhile as soon you divert the pigs with something new.

It is true that shotgunning a mix of vitamins and minerals at pigs who demonstrated ETBS has in some cases, cleared up the EBTS in those pigs. However, correlation does not prove causation and there are no concrete scientific studies which validate the mineral deficiency = EBTS theory.

Synergy Group, the company behind Truehope makes several claims about the science behind and manufacturing of their supplement. Let’s examine some of those claims.

The first thing you should know about Synergy Group’s Empower formula is that it contains nearly forty run-of-the mill vitamins and minerals that you can find in many other supplement formulas. During my research for this the first thing I did was to go to the Truehope website where they list the ingredients for Empower.

Synergy Group is not the only company that lists their supplement ingredients. During my research I checked out Centrum formulas like Centrum Silver and Centrum Active. I checked out GNC formulas like Solotron Platinum and Women’s Hair, Skin and Nail formula. I checked out Flintstone’s multivitamin for kids. I checked out a generic prenatal formula sold at Walgreen’s.

The website would have you believe that “EMPowerplus contains a broad spectrum of vitamins and trace minerals in a balance designed specifically for people with mental illnesses”

Synergy Group is Mr Stephen and Mr Hardy and their paid employees, admins and consultants. Syngery Group’s marketing department would have you believe that Mr Stephen whose background is in property managing and Mr Hardy whose background is in sales, have, between the two of them, figured out the precise metabolic and nutritional differences between otherwise healthy people and people with ADHD, schizophrenia, Tourette’s, Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive and many more mental health problems.

How do these two guys know what the precise zinc or Vitamin A requirements a person with depression needs? When did these experiments take place? Where is this massive testing population that would have been necessary to determine the exact amount of say, Vitamin B2 or calcium that a bipolar needs versus what someone with ADHD needs versus what a healthy person’s levels are?

The wording of that statement:

“In a balance designed specifically for people with mental illnesses”

implies that these two men have all this information figured out. Empower is claimed to be formulated to remedy the deficiencies caused by bipolar, ADHD and even schizophrenia. When we compare Empower to some of the above multivitamins from other brands we don’t really have huge differences but there are some. Here is just a sample for comparison.

Amount of Biotin per formula.

Empower: 3000mcg
Centrum: 3000mcg
GNC: 30mcg
Flintstone’s: 40mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0mcg

Amount of Vitamin A per formula

Empower: 1536 IU
Centrum: 5000 IU
GNC: 15000 IU
Flintstone’s: 3000 IU
Walgreen’s prenatal: 4000 IU

Amount of Folic Acid (vitamin B9) per formula

Empower: 384 mcg
Centrum:  400 mcg
GNC: 400 mcg
Flintstone’s: 400 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 800 mcg

Amount of Calcium per formula

Empower: 352 mg
Centrum: 1000 mg
GNC: 200 mg
Flintstone’s: 100 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 200 mg

Amount of Riboflavin (Vitamin B2) per formula

Empower: 3.6 mg
Centrum: 1.7 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s:  1.7 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 1.7 mg

Amount of Iron per formula

Empower: 3.7 mg
Centrum:  18 mg
GNC: 10 mg
Flintstone’s: 18 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 28 mg

Amount of Niacin per formula

Empower: 24 mg
Centrum: 20 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s: 15 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 20 mg

Amount of Choline per formula

Empower: ??mcg
Centrum: 0 mcg
GNC: 50 mcg
Flintstone’s: 38 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0 mcg

Amount of Inositol per formula

Empower ?? mcg
Centrum: 0 mcg
GNC: 50 mcg
Flintstone’s: 0 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0 mcg

Synergy Group makes the claim that many people who suffer from mental illness may be deficient in vitamins, minerals and amino acids. There seems to be some scientific evidence that backs that up.

Did you know?

There are clinical lab tests, blood and urine analysis which can determine if you truly have a nutritional deficiency. It is not logical to assume you are deficient in anything unless you know that you are not routinely eating balanced nutritious meals.

Before you start stuffing your gullet with overdoses of vitamins and minerals be sure you actually have a deficiency. Otherwise, it is a total waste of money as your body’s natural balancing act will simply flush all the unneeded and excess vitamins and minerals out of your body anyway.

Did you know?

Clinical testing of Empower’s formula has demonstrated that the actual concentration of the supposed specially balanced ingredients can vary as widely as 70% per batch. I suspect that this is not necessarily an EMpower issue and more of an artifact of bulk industrial processing that occurs to other supplements too but still.

Can you imagine if the caffeine in your morning coffee fluctuated as much as 70%? If treated with lithium, can you imagine the lithium fluctuating as much as 70% per dose? If taking morphine for post surgical pain management can you imagine if it fluctuated up to 70% per dose? Can you imagine if the alcohol in good old cheap American beer fluctuated that much per bottle?

Whether we use substances for medical or recreational purpose a 70% variation in potency would be absolutely unacceptable if we are trying to maintain a certain blood level of a chemical to gain it’s effects consistently. Now we are to assume that the efficacy of the carefully selected and balanced Empower formula is just fine with as much as 70% variance?

One supporting claim made by Synergy Group is that the consumer gains more benefit from Empower due to the chelation processing that they put their supplement through which supposedly increases the bioavailability of their formula.

Did you know?

Chelating minerals does in fact make them more bioavailable when the process is done thoroughly.

Did you know?

The chelation process is laborious, time consuming and costly. In bulk industrial processing only a portion of the mixture, anywhere from 50 to 60 percent is properly chelated.

Did you know?

No matter how much chelation a mineral goes through, no matter how bioavailable it is your body can only absorb a certain amount which differs from person to person somewhat. When your body has reached that amount the remainder is passed out through urine and stool within a day or two.

Did you know?

Synergy Group is not the only supplement company that puts their formula through a chelation process. On any given night at the chelation plant, the Empower formula is just one of several lots from different companies being processed. You can find chelated formulas from other suppliers.

Did you know?

The best, most natural bioavailable form of consuming vitamins and minerals takes places in our intestines as our own digestive process naturally chelates the organic compounds in food like broccoli or walnuts or fish or whatever. You don’t actually need chelated formulas, your body can chelate biomolecules just fine.

As I mentioned earlier, I am a proponent of nutritional awareness for mental health recovery. I am not trying to encourage or discourage anyone from trying Empower. My advice, if you intend on trying it, would be to first give a few, cheaper, multivitamin formulas a try.

Do an experiment on yourself. Try one multivitamin for four weeks and take notes on how you feel. Try a different multivitamin for another four weeks and take notes on how you feel. You may very well find yourself gaining some mental or emotional benefit from them. Then, if you want to be sure, go ahead and try some Empower for four weeks and see if it makes a difference.

If you feel much better on it than on other supplements you may be on to something. If you notice the benefits are more or less the same as what you were getting from your Other Brand Multivitamin then there is no reason to spend the extra money on Empower.

While the Bipolar Disorder to Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome connection is pretty weak there is some real evidence that vitamin supplementation can help people with mental health issues. The question then becomes, does Synergy Group’s Empower formula really offer you something unique that you can not get elsewhere? The answer is, probably not.

Although their marketing strategy tried to convince you otherwise, we know that there are other, cheaper sources of multivitamin formulas which have gone through chelation processing and have a higher bioavailability of nutrients than ionic or colloidal formulas.

Don’t let the chelation, bioavailability lingo distract you from the facts. No matter how much bioavailable nutrients you consume, there is a limit to how much your body can take before you are overdosing for no real therapeutic reason and you are facing diminishing returns.

So, if Empower is a cure, how long does it take before you are cured? That was one of my first questions. A week? A month? A year? How much of this stuff do you take and for how long until your bipolar or schizophrenia is gone for good?

When I asked one of the youtubers that was pimping Truehope on my videos that question, this was his answer.

“Well you take them… just like you eat food, just like you breath, just like you meditate, I thought I already said that, I did. I thought that was a good enough answer.”

Wow. Just…wow. I coaxed this answer out of him after several attempts at asking the question again and again which he continuously evaded as he tried to derail and deflect the conversation in different directions using the time honored distraction of asking me unrelated questions rather than give an honest, simple answer to my question.

Perhaps these random youtube people are just not ideal presenters for this product. Let’s check out the professional customer service representatives with their precise and very carefully worded little scripts and see if they have the answers I was interested in.

I found these tracks and quoted the important stuff.

To be fair, if you listen to the calls you will note that I quoted out of context. I picked the really ‘telling’ statements and put them together because that is how my brain interpreted what I was hearing. The actual statements can be listened to on these tracks or you can backhack the link and get the transcripts from the site itself.

How does EMpower work and how much do you take for how long?

Customer support call for bipolar disorder

“Generally what will happen after you start the EMpower it gets into your body and starts repairing that chemical imbalance a little bit at a time. Generally everyone starts off at 18 (capsules) a day.  That is what we have found through our research that your body needs. Once you have gone three months without symptoms that is when we would begin to find a maintenance dose for you. Generally we see people maintaining at 9-12 per day.” ( About half or slightly less than half of the ‘loading’ dose apparently)

It’s creepy similar to what the psych nurses and my psychiatrist told me in the hospital. I was to start off at the highest doses possible of trilafon and lithium to get me ‘adjusted’ as fast as possible. Reducing dosing would be considered way down the line after I had some number of months on max doses.

The psych nurse who added lithium to the mix a few weeks after the antipsychotic explained the need for it like this, “You are bipolar. You have a chemical imbalance which causes you to be unable to control your moods from one pole to the other. Lithium will stabilize that chemical imbalance.”

My response was probably a slurred and tired,

“Uh, ok, sure whatever.”

I was told I would never be able to live without medications or I would become ill again. As a teen who was doped out on a neurolpetic I did not have the faculties or critical thinking ability needed to turn back to this psych nurse and say something like,

“Wait, what?”

or

“I beg pardon?”

I did not know what questions to ask.

What happens if you come off EMpower?

Customer support call for depression.

“EMpower corrects the chemical imbalance in the brain by supporting it with vitamins and minerals. If you were ever to come off EMpower your body would no longer have that support. Your original symptoms would return. So, it’s unfortunately, an incurable illness.”

Wait a second. This is also the same story that psychiatrists tell you about your illness and meds. Let’s bring this whole thing to a halt here and start asking some questions.

When the psych nurse told me lithium would stabilize my chemical imbalance, what chemical imbalance are we talking about here? There is no concrete proof that any particular ‘chemical imbalance’ is to blame for bipolar. Was I suffering from a lithium deficiency?

Perhaps she was referring to the thoroughly debunked serotonin and other neurotransmitter ‘deficiency’ theories. Most of the really crappy research done on the serotonin deficiency theories were related to depression. Even if these studies did pan out the ‘serotonin deficiency theory’ it certainly does not explain the ‘manic’ aspect of bipolar.

What about the customer reps at Truehope calling centers? Their statements would seem to imply that Syngery Group has a better understanding of these chemical imbalances than Harvard researchers. Right?

Are these Truehope folks even talking about the same chemical imbalances that your psychiatrist told you about? Although they use the term glibly enough the Truehope folks’s definition of a chemical imbalance is a bit different from the definitions of biopsychiatry researchers and pharma companies.

The folks over at Truehope use the ‘Nutrient Theory of mental illness’ That means when these reps are talking about EMpower ‘going in and repairing those imbalances’ they are coming from a point of view that all these mental illness, bipolar, depression, ADHD, anxiety are all caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Some of you may be familiar with Linus Pauling, two time Nobel prize winner and father of orthomolecular medicine. He did some experiments in which people with various mental health issues were given megadoses of vitamins and noticed improved functioning in some of them.

The ‘science’ underpinning Truehope can be boiled down to these summations of the information they are presenting on that website:

• A. Mental illness is considered to be a chemical imbalance. Since vitamins and minerals are necessary for proper production of neurotransmitters a deficiency in vitamins and minerals may be the cause of your chemical imbalance.
• B. Some scientists theorize that some people have a genetic need for more vitamins and minerals than others. Some scientists have show that some genetic mutations require more vitamins and minerals. We at Truehope have connected all the dots here. People with bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, OCD, clinical depression and ADHD are genetic mutants with active deficiencies of vitamins and minerals the specifics and exact amount of which we have figured out and presented as EMpower to fix those deficiencies.
• C. The deficiencies of these genetic mutants are causing their brain cells to shrink and die. That has to have some kind of effect.
• D. One of our company founders thinks that maybe it’s all about being deficient in a few vitamins and minerals and this causes systemic wide chain reactions which lead to even greater deficiencies or inability to properly uptake some nutrients. Our formula fixes all that stuff no problem because we know exactly what it takes to remedy that.

Oh. Really? Let’s look at an example and see what that means.

Amount of Niacin per formula

Empower: 24 mg
Centrum: 20 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s: 15 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 20 mg

Let me get this straight. I am supposed to believe that Mr. Hardy and Mr. Stephen have figured out that people with anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD and Tourette’s require 24 mg of Niacin? How did they figure that out?

It seems to me that the Centrum and Prenatal formulas are getting awfully close to the levels needed to treat those with genetic deficiencies of niacin. The GNC formula exceeds the amount of niacin needed to successfully treat these bipolars and depressives and their genetic deficiencies.

When we look at other ingredients we find similar levels.

Amount of Folic Acid (vitamin B9) per formula

Empower: 384 mcg
Centrum:  400 mcg
GNC: 400 mcg
Flintstone’s: 400 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 800 mcg

These guys at Truehope have got it all figured out. For regular folks who are just looking to supplement an active lifestyle 400 mcg of B9 are sufficient. If you have bipolar disorder you really only need 384 mcg of B9.

Remember, the folks at Truehope have balanced their formula specifically to address the chemical imbalances found in those people with genetic mutations which lead them to get mental health labels like ADHD and schizophrenia due to their deficiencies.

The dosing is not a one-to-one correspondence. The amounts listed consist of a single ‘serving’ of EMpower. One serving being four capsules. Their maintenance dosing guidelines would have you taking twice that amount to keep your symptoms at bay. This is after a prolonged period where you actually take four times that amount.

Typically your average multivitamin is taken once or twice a day. “One with every meal” are the instructions on the labels of some of them. If you take two GNC or Centrums daily this is more or less half of EMpower’s ‘maintenance dose’ for a good many of the very same vitamins and minerals.

I am really impressed that these two guys, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Stephen were able on their own to figure out the nutritional requirements imposed on those people with the genetic deficiencies which lead to chemical imbalances which are later diagnosed as ADHD, OCD, manic depression and so on.

What about the makers of GNC and Centrum and Flintstones vitamins? Don’t they realize that by simply doubling the daily supplementation regimen they would probably start getting people calling in to report their schizophrenia is clearing up?

Defenders of EMpower would say no. They would argue that that the chelated bioavailability of EMPower means it is superior to anything GNC or Centrum could do. What is stopping GNC and Centrum from getting into the curing of bipolar disorder business by simply chelating their formulas?

Defenders of EMpower might propose that even with chelation GNC or Centrum formulas still can’t do what EMPower does. Their defense will come down to this. “It’s the Colonel’s Secret Recipe that makes EMpower so good!”

Can we create a knock off of EMpower on our own? We could find a supplement with more or less the same ingredient list as EMpower that chelates their formula. Then we just start picking the other supplements off the shelves.

Purchase some ginkgo, phenylalanine, glutamine, inositol and combine that with a double dose of Centrum Complete and you would be getting very, very close to the formula that EMpower has.

Close enough that if you had bipolar or schizophrenia and you created this formula yourself and experimented on yourself at the dosing levels described by the Truehope customer reps then if you are one of these people with a genetic deficiency than there is a very good chance that you may get some noticeable improvements.

I don’t think that Mr Hardy and Mr Stephen have figured out that kids with ADHD or Tourettes or teens with depression or adults with schizophrenia are all equally handled by ingesting mega doses of certain nutrients.

I don’t believe it frankly. I don’t believe they have the scientific papers, the statistics, the hard data that would indicate that taking 96 mg of niacin daily is what it takes to put schizophrenia in remission. Not 196 mg or 3 mg daily. No. 96 mg.

They would have us believe they have figured out the exact amounts, not only of niacin or folic acid but also the other 38 vitamins and minerals and supporting amino acids.  I don’t believe it. You, as a customer and consumer should at least hesitate to believe it.

It would be really nice if they could post their research findings in the interests of transparency and for the good of medicine. I want to know more about their research protocols other than randomly testing some formulas out on their friends and children. I want to see research data.

They are definitely not forthcoming with how they figured out the precise formulas for the nutritional needs of bipolars. What about kids with Tourettes? Come on. It stinks of bullshit that they are really sitting on information we would hope, gleaned from hard won trial and error and proper double blind studies. We are asked to take it on faith and to accept the very convenient family stories told by Mr Hardy and Mr Stephen.

I figured that if this was a real cure then you would be done with their supplement once your symptoms were gone for a good long while. No way. That would not make any money. It is very telling that these folks use the same language, the exact same language that pharmaceutical companies do when they market psychiatric meds.

“Prozac is one medicine in a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, that work to fix these chemical imbalances.”

“Abilify, for the mainenance treatment of Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia”

The folks over at Truehope are telling you that your genetic mutation that makes you perpetually deficient in vitamins and minerals is an incurable illness. Discontinue EMpower and it’s back to relapseville for you.

Is that really a cure then? It’s a treatment in the same vein as psychiatric drugs. A treatment you are never suppose to stop. It’s a healthier alternative to psychiatric meds, that much is sure.

The Truehope marketing department is top notch. They have co-opted the big pharma jargon like ‘chemical imbalance’ and ‘maintenance dose’. They have co-opted the nutritional supplement buzz words like ‘chelated’, ‘bioavailable’ and ‘deficiency’.

Then they take an average multivitamin supplement. They pack it with a variety of aminos and other compounds that are all the rage in nutrition and health food circles. Supplements that you would normally buy separately. Then they have the formula chelated and voila, they have a very complete, high quality nutritional supplement.

As a supplement, it seems so complete that even I could be tempted by it. Setting aside the misgivings about how consistent this formula is prepared industrially, taking one or two EMpower capsules a day I would be theoretically getting the same things as the combination I get from several different supplements and formulas. Taken at face value, as a health supplement it’s solid.

One thing that bugs me about Truehope is the cheesy ‘feel good ‘ names they call themselves and their stuff. Another thing that bothers me is their one-size-fits-all approach. It’s their claims to being able to fix such an incredibly wide array of mental problems with one supplement. They don’t seem to offer much advice if the stuff does not work. Much like Big Pharma they tell you to keep taking it anyway claiming that the balancing can take months and to bear with it.

It’s terribly disingenuous of them to use the same language as Big Pharma but you know what? Their marketing people know it works. People sees these ads for Celexa, Abilify, Cymbalta or Seroquel and they are readily convinced they have some unspecific chemical imbalance issue which these drugs are going to ‘maintain’ for them. The bs meters of the people buying these drugs did not go off after seeing a TV advertisement for psychiatric meds and they are not going off for Truehope either.

To sell nutritional supplements or psychiatric medications you have to tell potential customers why they need those products. You use scare language and convince them they are missing something they need that you have. People get enchanted by buzz words and jargon. People eat them up, pun intended.

Listen to those phone calls and don’t tell me you are not both amused and appalled at what these reps are saying and the Big Picture that is revealed when they talk about the dosing.  They are not selling just hype hope. They are selling fear too. If you uncritically accept what these reps tell you then you may very well be successfully convinced that you have a genetic mutation that means you are subject to perpetual vitamin and mineral deficiency. What you need to do as a critically thinking consumer is to find out if it is really true that you are have this deficiency.

When you think you have True Hope in the palm of your hand you are setting yourself up for the expectation effect, selective thinking, confirmation bias and the placebo effect. If you went to your GP and got some blood work done and the results came in and you did not have any deficiencies and yet you still suffered from depression, bipolar, schizophrenia or whatever, then what? You are back to square one.

If you got that blood work done before you bought EMpower than you know now, instead of guessing whether or not you really have a deficiency genetic or otherwise. I know what you are thinking. That would take all the magic out of it.

Personal anecdote about the power of real hope.

When I was fifteen I lived in a very scary place. I was placed in a lockdown facility, a special school for teens with major emotional and behavioral issues. I had been Dxd with Bipolar 1 and Schizoaffective months earlier. Secretly, I had just stopped taking my meds.

Without the drugs my mental abilities and perceptions came back online. I found the Patient’s Bill of Rights and I learned that I was now of the age of consent to refuse meds legally. I also found out they could not keep me locked up there anymore if I was not being ‘treated’ anymore. It’s called Habeas Corpus.

When I read that I knew there was possibility that I could get out of there. I was living in the company of disturbed sometimes violent teenagers amidst neurotic and occasionally abusive staff. I was in lockdown with very few rights or privileges. It was the middle of winter. My family had more or less given up on me. I had been abandoned, again, this time to psychiatric gulag.

When I read the Bill of Rights and learned about Habeas Corpus for the first time in a long time I had true hope. That hope was like divine light from inside. It swept aside my depression and anger. I was cheerful. Magnanimous. Happy. Content even. My mood totally reversed itself and I felt unstoppable. I knew real victory for me against my keepers was at hand. In fact I did win, in court a few months later and I got out of there.

The point is, real true hope can totally change your mental and emotional states around. Totally and completely and so fast it’s like magic. It can shatter months long depression and make you smile.

In my opinion Synergy Group’s decision to call themselves Truehope was pure marketing genius. If you are desperate and suddenly you have hope you may have a spontaneous remission of your suffering based entirely off the feeling of purpose and confidence you now possess.

For some maybe it’s almost subliminal but to me it’s a form of suggestion, to call their product ‘EMpower’ and their shtick ‘Truehope’. What is stopping GNC or Centrum from tweaking their formula and coming up with a competing  cure for that genetic mutation? Wouldn’t they make even more money? Would they call it TRanquil? or INspire? NUbalance? HealingZ?

A lot of folks have experimented on themselves like I did and found some emotional or thought related improvements from supplementation. I had enjoyed some great benefits from mere generic multivitamins when I was not taking care of myself all that well.

When I started taking care of myself and eating and living better the effects of supplements became much less. Unless you really do in fact have a proven and documented medical condition that prevents the natural uptake of vitamins and minerals then your body will naturally uptake and absorb what it needs from a well balanced diet.

There is no need to ‘buy’ into the ‘nutrient deficiency theory’ and just assume you happen to have a genetic defect. That’s what Truehope expects you will do. They expect you to connect the dots and conclude that your mental health issues are the result of a genetic mutation and that their product makes perfect sense to take to treat it.

In that they are just like Big Pharma who does not expect you will go on the internet and dig up research and studies which would show just how weak and unproven their chemical imbalance claims are. You are a customer. You are residual income to them and it makes good financial sense to get everyone into ‘maintaining’ themselves with whatever pills or supplements are the latest rage.

Find out first, if you really have a genetic mutation that means you require four to twenty times the USDA recommended levels of vitamins and minerals. Just ask your GP for a blood lab. You will know in a few days or weeks. The Truehope reps won’t tell you to do that.

Anything in life that is really worth having may be hard to attain. Lasting and stable mental health is one of those things that is worth having. If you have been seriously mentally ill for a long time it’s probably not going to be easy to attain.

I have been depression free for well over a decade. I have not had clinical or disabling anger, anxiety or manic issues in well over a decade. I cured myself of bipolar disorder, schizoaffective and ptsd.  Supplementation was about 2-5 %  of my overall personal mental health pyramid. It had an effect, but it did not cure me of anything.

What cured me was meditation. Real meditation done properly over a long enough period of time changes your brain. The changes are so thorough and complete that I do not need to meditate every single day for hours on end like I did during my 20s when I was actively trying to attain emotional stability and mental quiet.

I have gone through long stretches where I did not take my supplements.  In the wake of 9-11 the company I worked for eventually shut down permanently. There was long period of time where I could not afford to supplement like I had been. I did not relapse because I stopped taking multivitamins.

I can go without meditation or supplements for long periods and not relapse because I was really and truly cured. I was changed. My brain changed. In psychiatric lingo my ‘chemicals’ became balanced again. When you are no longer dependent on pig pills or psych meds to remain stable you have a real cure. Otherwise, aren’t you just in treatment?

I tell people that if they think they really are cured or recovered then they should find out if it’s really true. That means taking personal responsibility for your mental states and going through a period of time where you discontinue psych meds or supplements to find out for sure if you really are recovered underneath.

No psych med or herbal remedy or multivitamin or amino acid can heal your spirit. If you are spiritually lost and adrift no supplement is going to fix you. If you hate and loathe yourself no pill or capsule is going to fix that.

There is no supplement that can give you real self love and self respect. Those are two ingredients that I find are ‘deficient’ in a lot of people who suffer from mental illness and have labels like bipolar or borderline.

Self-love, self-respect and inner peace are a kind of magic too. If you love yourself truly you won’t self injure or want to terminate your own life. If you love life then you won’t suffer like those folks who think life is against them and they hate the world. If you have inner peace you have a shield against thought disorders, mania, compulsions and obsessive thinking.

You can achieve lasting mental health recovery by tending to the needs of your spirit and by embracing a lifestyle of simplicity, moderation and spirituality. You can help yourself by learning to relax, manage stress and let go of things you can’t control.

Some issues just go away with time. Maturity heals some kinds of problems. Getting older, growing up and the process of aging can find that you have picked up all sorts of cerebral ways to cope with impulses. Learning about your sensitivities and limits can allow you to avoid maxing out your stress levels. You learn to take it easy and to take care of yourself better and your bad days of major symptoms come less and less often as a result.

If you have a real genetic condition that prevents you from uptaking bioavailable minerals and vitamins you can get blood work to establish that fact and working with your doctor you can come up with a supplementation regimen that fits *you* and your needs and not just some one-size-fits-all capsule that is apparently good enough for everyone and anyone who has issues.

Some EMpower defenders may find this post and say to me,

“EMpower has helped me so get off your crusade bitch you don’t know what you are talking about. This stuff saves lives. Who are you to talk smack about my beloved EMpower? Oh and Linus Pauling is God and you don’t have a Phd so stfu.”

I actually have had these kinds of comments before from people who took great personal offense that I dared call it Pig Pills or Truehype.  You know what folks? I got the same kinds of aggressive comments, not to mention verbal abuse or ad homs, from people defending psychiatric meds when I ripped into them too.

There is something a little sketchy about the folks coming out with autobiographies on how Truehope saved their life. They are not just sharing their experiences and moving on. If you go to their sites they are selling Truehope products usually in what I assume can only be a mutual interests back scratching and profiteering franchise of some kind. They are getting paid to pimp Truehope.

I am not anti-recovery and I don’t have an anti-Truehope agenda. But I think Truehope has got sleaze all over it though. From the weasel-word salad that is their FAQ’s and research pages to their sweepingly huge claims in terms of how many mental issues they claim they cure. In the past miracle cures claiming to be effective in curing ‘everything’ have always panned out to be false, misleading or untrue. Always.

If you have been saved by EMpower, good for you. I hope it lasts. I hope you are not deceiving yourself and unnecessarily assuming you have a genetic mutation that requires you to take much greater amounts of vitamins and minerals than other people. If you really do have such a deficiency by all means keep on taking your capsules.

If you won’t get tested to see if that is really the case I hope you will one day have the self honesty and courage to find out if you are really cured of anything by trying a discontinuation period to see if you have really changed.

There will be those that defend EMPower and their final rebuttal will invariably be.

“If it helps people is that wrong? What do you have against that? If it works, what’s your problem? How can it be bad if people are benefiting from it? Who cares what it’s made of or how it’s made? Who cares who made it and why? If it works who are you to judge?”

I don’t have a problem with that at all. Some of us just like to look under the proverbial hood and see what’s underneath. We wonder how the tricks are done and try to figure them out out of curiosity and a need to know how things work.

Look in the mirror one of these days and look at yourself in the eye and ask yourself if you are not riding hype, expectancy and the placebo effect. If you don’t want to find out or you don’t care how the magic works as long it works then fine.

This has been a really long post. In closing, I have not personally tried EMpower so take my opinions with that in mind. I am not encouraging or discouraging anyone from trying EMpower. As I said earlier, from what I can tell, as supplements go it is a very complete one. If it was called TaiChiDragonFuel or something like that I would probably take it myself as my one-a-day multi.

I posted this originally on my old blog and it got two comments. (Shortly after, I ended my old blog to finish up my book-writing.)

notyouraveragegirl said:Thank you Jane. One of my friends has been trying to get me to take this crap and I feel the exact same way about it. If you want to be whole that badly, you’ll convince yourself anything works.

Margot, feel free to come by and repost again.

Cure is worse than the disease?

Girl Normal has a very entertaining and spot-on criticism post this week about Big Pharma, complete with witty satirical images. Here is a snippet:

“I know I’m not the first to discuss this particular quirk of our modern society…but I think I might be the first to address it via cute cuddly snowball people. Have you ever been sitting, watching TV, and one of those glossy happy-people drug commercials comes on? Do you find yourself strangely attracted and repulsed at the same time? Here’s what I’ve noticed about these particular commercials:”

• 1. You’re never really sure what the drug is or what it does.
• 2. You’re pretty sure that the people in the commercial have better lives than you despite having some terrible disorder.
• 3. You’re almost pretty sure that whatever the disease is, it’s probably not as bad as the side effects of the drug in question.
• 4. But the people in the commercial look so happy, that you’re not really sure of anything anymore.

Very brave to so boldly mock Big Pharma in an era when, anytime someone criticizes meds they are angrily written off as $cient0l0gists. Go read the rest over at Girl Normal’s blog.

This is similar to, and far more artsy than, a pharma critical post I did a year ago on another site. I’ll try to find it and post again here. It generated incoming crawls from Big Pharma product image management companies nearly instantly the first time I posted it.

I, Ship

The Hybrid is an organic consciousness that inhabits a bio-mechanical transport vessel. She receives thousands of data stream flows and trivial sensory downloads per minute. She is connected physically, electrically, hormonally to every part of her bioship. Hybrid must balance all of this information and keep her mind ordered to keep ships systems intact and on course, everyday, without fail.

No hybrid is perfect. And so–sometimes errors creep into the code. They may need to be edited. Too much pressure on one system sends a cascade effect into other systems. Hydraulic, energetic, and emotional imbalances occur, are diagnosed, rebalanced. All in a days work for Hybrid. Hybrid is usually self-correcting because it optimizes positive global function which brings inner harmony to all organic systems and biological sub-processors.

Underneath the data stream in Hybrid’s mind is the hum. The hum started the day the ship went online and never ends. But underneath the omnipresent hum is a vast tranquil reserve of grace and equally omnipresent stillness. Where the data streams are just that, streams upon streams in an ocean of streams. Integrated into Hybrid’s mainframe is the mindstream and it is from there Hybrid draws the strength to operate her ship.

Hybrid is the heart-mind of her ship―she is for all intents and purposes―the ship. She is―Ship. And if you were allowed to look at a data log of her stream of consciousness for a few moments, it might look something like this…

I, Ship

The shell is a Ship that sails through the stream of time. The Ship sings a song that goes on and about. As far as I detect within I also sense without. End of line. The Ship is a little Heaven and Earth. As above–so below. Right and left, yin and yang–separate and combine. End of line.

Systems check. Wetware: OK. Hardware: energy spike detected in CerebralNexusNode: 834001. Monitoring. Scanning new information contact. Data node detected. SetInterestLevel:7. Accessing. Handshake. Handshake. Data collision warning. Adjusting downstream pipeline to compensate. Rerouting auxiliary attention and memory blocs. Shunt overflow to redundant processors. Breathe.

Inhale.OntologicalInquiryInitiated. What was –I– before –I– was aware of –I–? End of line. DRADIS contact detected. Scanning. Contact is a Ship. Male. AlertStatus: Passive. H:6F.2I.W:240  EstimatedTotalHealthValue:1300. IntensityLevel: 1. BreedabilityCoefficientSetValue: 5. InterestLevelValueSet: Nil. HeartCenter reports: “Just not my type.” There are many fishes in the sea. Some for him and some for me. End of line. ETTT at present course and velocity: 5s. Observe the procedure of a proximity alert. To avoid contact counter-scan, alter inertial vector 1C. Let Unit ‘C’ Value = 1m. Reduce ForwardHasteValue by 28%. AdjustNavigationParameters-authorized. Executing new script values. Don’t step in the puddle. Ships pass each other across the ocean. End of line. Exhale.

Reset. Which data node shall I access next? Initiate BinarySelectionProtocol. There is an itch on my nose. X32-Y119-Z74. IrritationLevelAnalysis: mild. Shunt diagnostic to auxiliary subroutine. How much money did I put in my purse before leaving homeworld? End of line. SampleAtmosphereSequence initiated. Inhale. Filter has detected exotic scent molecules. Exhale. That breeze feels lovely. End of line.

Scan deeply into a lie and you will detect a truth. There is motion in stillness and stillness in motion. End of line. BloodstreamMonitor reports a slight drop in energy level throughout primary systems control actuators and is requesting a diagnostic code. Request forwarded to PrimaryInternalDiagnostic and BalanceControl centers. Increased ListenValue for data traffic across ports 5, 7 and 9 engaged. Request received. Processing. Processing. Code: 34T. Minor nourishment intake approved. I am here and here I am. Open mental access port 3 and hear what your heart wants to say. End of line.

Priority 1 IntegralChronometer notification: “My How The Time Flies.” Fly in the sky. The sky is blue and so too, is the sea. Sea and sky―thee and thy. Blue mixes with the blue which mixes with the Blue. Don’t debate― and we won’t be late. Moving right along. Listen to the internal song. End of line. Reset.

Breathe. ForwardSectionCorticalOverwatch reports a faulty-logic build-up in political analysis file:#10384. Recompile. Look into the mirror to know thyself. End of line. So much to process when you are Ship. Never dull in here. A Level 3 cramp has been detected in MidSection UV77. Diagnostic subroutine initialized. All this has happened before, and will happen again. End of line.

Author commentary: The vision for this piece came from many sources converging all at once to create a moment of inspiration. First, I am an unapologetic, raging science fiction nerd. It started with Buck Rogers, Heinlein and Asimov. Then ST TOS,-TNG, BSG OS, SW I, II, III, etc. Authors include Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge, Herbert, ect, all the main greats. The living organic bioship  with its eternal hum and awareness comes from Babylon 5 ‘The First Ones’ spaceships.

There is also some of Anne MacCaffrey’s ‘The Ship Who Sang’ and ‘The Ship Who Searched’ in there, and obviously the over-arching influence comes from the Cylon Hybrid that runs the Basestar from the re-imagined BSG series. Underneath all that is some commentary about the nature of the mind from the perspective of a Ship whose primary coding language, navigation software and matrix interface protocol is TaoistMeditation :)

The Hybrid explained from Wiki:

“The Hybrid speaks strange, seemingly random phrases, which most Cylons interpret as the nonsensical babbling of a deranged mind. However, the Leoben model of Cylons believe that every word the Hybrid speaks means something, and that the Cylon god speaks through the Hybrids. The Caprica Model Six Cylon, however, has given an alternate explanation: The Hybrids do not perceive their existence in the same way as normal beings. They possess an expanded awareness of being one entity existing in space as well as perceiving all activity in their basestar’s interior. The Hybrid may also express the state of the ship physically, as demonstrated when one has a physical reaction during an FTL jump, similar to an orgasm.”

Poor Brother Cavil, one the significant seven Human Cylon models, clearly hates being created ‘normal’ and shows his extreme Hybrid envy with one of the most sexy, plaintive speeches I’ve ever heard a robot say in all of science fiction:

"I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to – I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly because I have to – I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me! I’m a machine! And I can know much more."

Meditation as a cure for mental illness

In 1989, when I went inpatient for the first time, I thought there was going to be a line-up of hippy psychologists with beards and geeky glasses and long hair who talked about Jung as easily as Freud. I imagined I would spend hours in therapy with my favorite counselors when I was good and ready to talk. I thought I would get to pick the shrinks that I got good vibes from and that I would basically get a no pressure, stress-free time to decompress from my inner pain. Be left alone.

I soon discovered that being inpatient and receiving psychiatric treatment wasn’t anything like I had fantasized. I hardly ever saw a therapist. It was just being force-marched from one group activity to another, always being made to do what they told me to do under threat of the Quiet Room for acting out or resisting or complaining or questioning why —I— had to go to groups that I wanted no part of.

Eventually, I was forced to take a debilitating overdose of drugs that I never desired or asked for. Drugs that seriously screwed me up and made living with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and my life in general as a teen far, far worse. All the psych nurses told me was, “You are bipolar, these are the drugs that bipolars have to take. Swallow them now, or we’ll pin you to the floor and make you.” No choice at all.

As for my bipolar ‘cred’, I was born to an artist and musician mother who was an abuser and who suffered from suicidal depression and manic episodes all while we were growing up. My own depression started at age six, drawing images of my own death with Crayola crayons.

Like my mother I am naturally something of an artist and musician. The creativity and interest and ability comes spontaneously from within. I am sure you can imagine the results of a mania-fueled inspiration spree where you simply must finish a drawing or sketch that is fixated in your mind.

You tune out everything, forgetting to eat and not needing to sleep, insanely pissed off at anyone who dares to interrupt your muse or distract you, for as long as that image or song in your mind demands that it be realized by your own hands. Only when it is finally the way you want it, does the pressure in your head leave off and you can deal with people and responsibilities again.

Basically, according to manic depressive expert Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, I had the classic ‘artistic temperament’ inherited matrilineally. And the standard treatment for the depression and the recurring manic and psychotic features of that genetic package is: a lifetime sentence to being on lithium and neuroleptics. But I never could accept that I was defective simply by birthright or that creative mania didn’t have its uses. Nor did I believe that I would be doomed forever to uncontrollable manic episodes or depression.

So, I used my constitutional right to refuse medical treatment (psych drugs) for my mental illnesses and decided to see if I could do better than the psychiatrist who had Dxd me bipolar-for-life. In the midst of what could only be called a spiritual emergency, after my last overdose and resulting near death experience, I put the brakes on my life. I stopped trying to slot into the rat race, keep up with the Joneses or cut myself a slice of the American pie.

I had been diagnosed as a child basically, a young teenager, with a lifetime disability. I could have gone on permanent government disability benefits as soon as I turned eighteen and no one would have blamed me. I experienced a lot of, what they call in Buddhism, ‘suffering’.

I had a difficult time coming up with reasons why I should continue to remain, and suffer, on this mortal coil for another day. I used to think long and hard about it all the time. I simply refused to accept that I was doomed from birth to a life of mental illness. Which led me to studying meditation with a couple different people.

I decided that my next big ‘grandiose’ plan would be to see if I could put some of the techniques I learned from them into play. And see if I couldn’t somehow find the DOS window, the access port to my own inner matrix. Really apprehend the code in my being that programmed me with recurring mania and depression cycles—and play with it. See if I couldn’t edit that code just a little and get a noticeable result.

What happened is that, slowly, week by week, month by month, year by year, all the intense, uncontrollable-seeming symptoms just slowly started to go away. As if my mental illness volume had started at zero, become about a level six or a seven as a child and evolved all the way to level eleven as a young adult. Then, as I started meditation, my mental illness seemed to begin to fade to ten, then nine, then eight. The better I got at programming my mental Disk Operating System, the closer I got to my madness.

For awhile, I even went backward. I had some moments when meditating, that the volume of my mental illness suddenly went from an eight, to a twenty-five. That was pretty rough. But I stuck with it and did not give up and the volume went back down again. Eventually, it rarely got higher than a four or five. Then it became a level one or two illness for awhile, barely there. Not really bothering me much. Then the volume simply stopped coming at all.

I have often wondered, how that could be? How did I get a cure, when my mother and sister and others do not? What did I do, that my sister and mother, didn’t do? Well, Ma went with the, “There is nothing wrong with me,” philosophy and so, never got better. My sister went with the, ‘It’s a chemical imbalance,’ idea, took all the right drugs, lithium included, and is, well, mostly disabled and not what anyone would call a happy or motivated person.

A lot of people seem to either, deny they have mental illness and therefore don’t acknowledge its existence and keep suffering. Or they get on the standard treatments they are told to take for life and get hung up on polypharmacy roulette and all the side effects that come with it.

Even those ‘proper treatments’ don’t work one hundred percent. For example, Dr. Kay Jamison says in her own memoir: ‘Unquiet Mind’, that despite being on lithium, she still has bad times and that it mostly stabilizes her, most of the time. I didn’t think that the side effects of this ‘mostly’ effective treatment which can leave you on the waiting list for kidney replacement surgery and dialysis, are worth it. That’s just me. I didn’t like the emotional blunting of lithium or how it screwed with my intense feelings. The risk-reward trade-off was not worth it in my book.

Thus, I was basically doomed to either self-medicate the worst of the depression and manic symptoms forever, or find another path. Unfortunately, psychologists and psychiatrists don’t know about other paths, generally speaking, and so can’t tell you about them or their effectiveness. So began a quest to learn how to self-heal—which led to meditation.

Meditation, it has been discovered, promotesneuroplasticity in the brain. And it does it, in the very area of the brain that has been fingered by some neuroscientists as being defective or underdeveloped in people with manic depression and schizophrenia. That is, meditation causes intricate connections to grow between your prefrontal cortex, your frontal lobe, amygdala and other basal brain structures, like a spider web that keeps getting denser and denser and more complex the longer you weave it. This has the net effect of growing a circuit in your brain that slowly reduces the wildness and intensity and unpredictability of mood swings, severe cycling, triggers, inner voices, psychosis, rages and all that stuff.

This makes total sense to me because, I did not get a magical cure. I didn’t wish upon a star and it was so a few days or even weeks later. My recovery was very subtle and slow and I didn’t even notice I was getting better until I realized one day like, “Hey, when the heck was the last time I was depressed or manic or assailed by loud internal voices?” And the answer was, “Hmm, let me think about that….wow…awhile. At least a year or two.”

Those two years became four, then six, then ten then fifteen. I am just as much a passionate person, an artist, with my full creativity intact as I ever was. I just don’t get the extremes anymore. It’s like I outgrew it. And the PET and MRI scans of brains of meditators show that, well, you do grow something. Greater connections from your frontal lobes to all your mood associated brain structures.

It takes years to cultivate this neuronal growth and complexity which essentially is like a self-policing DOS program, a defragmentation subroutine. A debugging utility that looms over all incoming and outgoing thought and emotion traffic like a firewall, opening and closing ports and granting or denying access. That Overwatch program is real neuronal hardware, grown in my head. It’s complex and intricate firing would be visible in a PET scan if I had one done. It reliably prevents me from going from one extreme pole to another. No more incredible destabilizing mental and physical energy shifts that used to take over my whole life and leave me exhausted, burned-out, restless and ill-at-ease.

So what did I do that my depressed mother, bipolar sister, and most other people with mental illness, don’t do? I ground my life to a screeching halt, and devoted myself to becoming a full-time, dedicated mental-matrix programmer. And I led a very boring, solitary, quiet life for many years while I did a whole lot of nothing. That is, I did a lot of sitting by the river or on my bed or in a chair, simply scanning and editing my inner software, finding the trojans and logic bombs, disarming them and moving on.

Did I discover a cure for manic depression and schizophrenia? Well, not a genetic or chemical one. What I did was, cure my mental and emotional malfunctions with an ontological device: meditation, which allowed me to directly access my mental and emotional states first-hand in a more intimate and confrontational and intense way than most any therapy that currently exists right now. Nothing counselors can do for you or teach you (that I know of) is as, well, frankly, awesome, as this very ancient method of getting your head and heart under control. CBT and DBT are fairly pedestrian compared to this kind of deep internal diagnostic and editing software.

What I mean is, if you are waiting for once or twice a month CBT sessions with a facilitator, you are missing out on a potentially much, much faster, but also, much riskier and more painful form of self-therapy which can, to be honest, seriously unhinge you in a hurry. Even if you do know what you are doing. However, if you can find inner relentlessness to get through those dark nights of the soul, you come out on the other side—changed. Stronger. Happier. More at peace. Free of your earlier conflicts and pain.

Only you can know if you can arrange your life to make that kind of training an obsession. And only you can find out if you have what it takes to work through the quintessence of madness and lunacy as you get closer and closer to your real mind. This is no joke. You can find yourself in dark water quite quickly, lost in your mental illusions, voices, self-doubts and uncontrollable imagery, even derealization or depersonalization, the deeper into the mind that you go.

A lot of people seem to endure an alarming array of awful physical and mental dysfunction on psychiatric medications in the hopes that the drugs will help. Meditation has its own dues to pay and unlike meds, there is no predicting: “Yeah, just tough it out for a few weeks, you’ll get better.”

You may come face to face with hell as you realize that you do not need to die to go there. That life itself—is hell. And meditation can potentially open the doors to that hell by sensitizing you to your own demons and head games and making them seem suddenly much louder, much more real and overpowering.

But it’s just your mind getting closer and closer to, and sensing more accurately, the noise that is going on inside you all the time. If you do persist, you can clear a portion of your inner sky. When you do that you achieve the eye of the storm inside your mind, you gain a little of what is called simply, stillness. You can rest and regroup there and recover. You will see that suffering is something your own mind manufactures for you, usually without your conscious awareness of it. When you do realize that, you can achieve a measure of control over it.

If you can somehow arrange your life so that you have no obligations, no responsibilities, no worries, and you can create a safe environment where you can be psychotic and ride it out without having a live-in relative instantly call 911 and get you picked up by the men in white coats and delivered with haste to the ‘proper’ experts on the mind. If you can arrange that kind of self safety-net and can overcome fear of actually being (even more) insane, then you may just have what it takes to face the whirlwind and come out on the other side using meditation.

Your chances of succeeding are higher if you are armed with the technical know-how and experiences that you can learn from different meditation instructors. In essence, you get the training and become your own guru, therapist and support group and you fix yourself by riding the lightning deliberately, so you can get the access codes that control the lightning.

The thing is this: People these days, unless they work out of a home office or operate a family vineyard or have some kind of slow-paced down-to-earth job, move so fast now, that they never witness changes to their own mindscape. Mood swings, erratic energy shifts and racing thoughts or suicidal ideas come out of nowhere, somewhere between attending a board meeting and picking up the kids from the soccer game. But if you spend hours and I mean hours, of your life in meditation, you can see these mood shifts coming like a cloud on the horizon.

You can determine for yourself how your own reactions to stress and triggers bring that cloud bearing down on you. Then you have a chance to reverse the mental and emotional firing, the stress hormones, the high speed chaos and inner turmoil and quite literally, reverse a manic or depressive episode before it even happens. But to gain that ability, to become Network Admin and Head Coder in your mental IT department you may have to radically change your life in ways most people would find unthinkable.

I can not guarantee that you would automatically get the same results from my practice as I did, anymore than a doctor can guarantee which drug side effects you will or will not come down with. What I can say with some degree of certainty, is that you have nothing to lose by trying. Even if you can’t do or don’t want to do what I did, which was, essentially give up on a career, a family, school, romance and dating, in order to devote every fiber of my being to understanding myself (not even knowing if it could work or how many years it would take before it did), you can start the process and give it a shot.

What do you have to lose except more years of life enslaved to your own suffering? Maybe you have a lot to lose Maybe you have a corporate job and three kids, two dogs, live-in in laws, sick, dependent or dying family members, a disabled spouse. If you have those kinds of commitments than curing yourself like I did, using that kind of lifestyle is for all intents and purposes, impossible. For you. For the time being at least.

Why this lifestyle worked so well for me, was that I didn’t have any of those things as a young adult. I didn’t have parents calling me to wish me luck on my finals for my grad school classes, pushing me to get into the rat race asap with a shiny new degree and then start making babies so my parents would shut up about wanting to be grandparents.

I had none of those pressures. I had a unique situation where I had no life. Nothing worth doing. It was either, kill myself just to stop the pointless suffering of my existence, or evolve into someone and something stronger and better using the only resource and interest that I had, which was spirituality and occult training.

Either way, I decided long ago that A: meds were a poisonous and dead end. And B: no one could help me, or hold me or walk with me through this process of self-healing. I had to accept it and know and understand, that I was responsible for everything inside my inner world. Every thought and feeling was mine and I owned them.

Not, well my MBTI score says I’m such and such a person and that’s that. Not, my planets and stars were aligned at birth in such a way as to be screwed from this life to the next. Not, it’s my genes’ fault, they made the chemical imbalances which made me be manic. Once I was able to own my suffering and everything inside me and call it me and not ‘bipolarity,’ I was able to start actually taking control over my supposedly uncontrollable thoughts and moods.

You don’t have to take that lifestyle to the extreme pole like I did. If you do something even slightly similar, eg, make more you-time, where you turn off the cell phone and log out of your instant-messenger and stop tweeting and blackberrying in order to try a little relaxation breathing, some mindfulness or something similar, your mind will become stronger and more capable of perceiving its own malfunctions and exerting will over them.

It’s not like the idea of being cured of mental illness was all that out-of-this-world once upon a time. In fact, if you read the book ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ by award-winning medical journalist Robert Whitaker, what you will find is that, long before New Era biological psychiatrists armed with anti-this and anti-that meds showed up and told us these conditions were incurable diseases, people did recover. They really got cured or went into remission for long periods, while some outright seem to outgrow the disorder. Almost as if their prefrontal cortex had finally fully matured and starteddoing its job.

There is much at stake in the race to win the info war on what people do or don’t believe about their own mental illnesses.  Some people will come out and say, “Recovered, not cured,” to draw attention to the fact they’re getting by, but they are still bipolar no matter what.

In my case, I get to have all the the culturally stereotyped, cool ‘bipolarity’ traits. Like being an artist, being inspired and having creative phases. But I don’t write emo poetry about my awful moods and my gloomy, passionate, but doomed life. I don’t draw pictures anymore that use up all my black paint. I don’t self-medicate with everything in sight to turn off the voices. I don’t talk about ‘being bipolar’ because I am not. Even though some of my other family members still ‘are’ by stress or temperament or diagnosis.

To be clear, I have not discovered a magic bullet, an easy short cut, a quick fix or a take-it-and-forget-it herbal or vitamin supplement that can clear you up in six weeks. What I discovered was that I was able to cure myself by pursuing a mind-body discipline which works directly with your thoughts and feelings in a profound and transformational way.

Years went by before I was cured. It was slow, gradual but also, inexorable cure, as I stuck with my crazy-sounding life of solitude–without a care in the world or a diaper to change or a mouth to feed other than my own. It was not an ‘easy’ cure. You can’t give this cure to someone. You have to teach it to them, then they have to make it happen and start changing their own brain. They may not succeed.

So, no miracle cure or alternative supplement. Not like some of the other theories and modalities you hear about to cure mental and physical illnesses. No detoxing and chelating or colonics or gluten free diets. No vitamin overdosing and omega three fatty acids. No distance healing or eating unprocessed honey. But I did try some of those things.

For example, I did the raw food diet, crystal healing and somatic therapies because I had little to lose at that point in my life. But most of those treatments really didn’t do a damn thing for me. Or, if I felt different initially, it was because I really believed that it would help, or the person that sold it to me had faith in it and pitched it to me very enthusiastically. In short, the placebo effect–which never lasted long before I was symptomatic again.

My cure was a lot of often painfully boring, seeming time-wasting, self-indulgence spent meditating by myself. Like some 90s era wannabe Neohippy drop-out who decided one day after a revelation, to tune in to a higher spiritual calling than slotting into the rat race just to keep up with the Joneses and hopefully die with the most and coolest toys.

In terms of what meditation is and really means to me, allow me to quote a dead guy named Chuang Tze, “Most people would find what I love, to be very uncomfortable or uninteresting.”

Meditation is the ultimate journey into inner and outer space. Can you think of a better more productive way to try to unravel yourself, and the meaning of life, at the same time? I don’t say that to sound patronizing. I simply mean that, if you had suicidal depression since you were a young child like I did, you too, probably spent a huge, ungodly, obsessive amount of time dwelling on the meaning of life and what is or isn’t worth pursuing, like social status, material wealth and ‘things’.

What value is there in stuff, if stuff just becomes something else to worry about? Why do you buy ‘stuff’? Beyond the necessities of life I mean. To distract you? To occupy time? I buy stuff now and read books and watch dvds and have ‘stuff’ delivered to my door for my amusement. But before I got to that point as an adult, I spent an enormous amount of time essentially dirt-poor.

During that time I learned how to amuse my mind and do something useful with myself after a day at the factory. I didn’t have to come home from work to feed the kids, pick up the cat from the vet, get my husband’s dry cleaning, attend a PTA meeting and all the million things people keep themselves busy with.

I had nothing, or, very little, that needed to be done. So I had no stresses that would interfere with my training goals. I didn’t worry about my GPA because I didn’t have one. I didn’t worry about my stock portfolio and investments for the same reason. I just had a, well, boring, private, antisocial and empty-seeming life that I filled up by doing spiritual practices and mind-body disciplines.

What else was I going to do? Being mentally ill for life didn’t sound like something I could accept nor something I wanted to brag about to others. It was embarrassing and futile-seeming. So, I got to work trying to fix the biggest problem in my life at the time. Me.

Meditation was my path to healing. Although I first received meditation training when I was thirteen, I learned it for the wrong reasons. To make myself more powerful and intense and well, strange. Because I wanted a spooky, intangible, psychic edge over other people out of deep insecurity and unresolved post traumatic stress. How much of my psychic experiences were really psychotic ones, is something I still think about and consider many years later.

By my very early twenties I had had several different kinds of meditation training and where had it got me? I was still trying to off myself about once or twice a year. And I was not a happy or pleasant person to be around unless I was stoned out of my mind. What was I doing wrong?

That is what led me to study with a man by the name of Bruce Frantzis who was advertising his Taoist meditation and dissolving training as something that could smooth out emotions, overcome inner obstacles and find yourself, in the midst of great internal disconnection and confusion. His was a method I hadn’t conceived of or heard about previously. Surrendering into your Being–by letting go and allowing transformation to happen. Instead of either forcing it to occur or trying to resist it kicking and screaming.

Dissolving is something that you do with your combined intent and awareness. You use this technique to scan and process your inner world. In Taoism, inner world can be a lot things, most beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, everything from your physical sensations to your emotions can be dissolved with your intent.  I used a specific format I learned from Mr Frantzis and his students. One that involves scanning and dissolving myself according to an idea about our ontological makeup called: ‘The Eight Bodies of Being’.

Using the dissolving process, I ransacked every corner of my heart and mind. I simply started from the top of my head and drained down to the floor of my pelvis with this technique. I released and let go of, everything that I was hung up on that prevented me from taking life and myself a little less seriously. The net result was that I became a little bit happier, bit by bit. year after year.

I started this meditation and dissolving method in my early twenties. At a time when frankly, a lot of people first come into contact with a big-time bipolar disorder or depression breakdown on the heels of stressful finals or a new high-pressure job or they start having kids or something. They start hearing voices ‘out of nowhere’. Some tipping point occurs to set them off on the downward spiral that they will later be told is an incurable, hereditary, genetic chemical imbalance.

My training and experiences did not make me enlightened with a capital E. I do not have a halo nor do I even consider myself to be a good role model. I can still be irritated and annoyed. I am not perfect and without flaws. I did absolutely cure myself of several supposedly incurable diseases: PTSD, manic depression and schizophrenia–so that must count for something.  I haven’t tried to hurt myself in over fifteen years. I’ve been depression and psychosis free for well over a decade. I am fairly well-adjusted these days, despite my disadvantages growing up.

I healed my inner world with a technique I learned called ‘inner dissolving.’ Which is Bruce Frantzis’ meditation method: The Water Course Way of Lao Tze. In my experience, it is a path to real healing. It’s a road less traveled. And it can take you every place you ever wanted to go inside.

 

Anatomy of an Epidemic, a review

In ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ Robert Whitaker takes us on a journey and demonstrates how industrial compounds and various chemical ‘magic bullets’ evolved into the psychiatric drugs and ‘blockbusters’ as we know them today.

He reveals the faulty logic, media deceptions, and special interests behind the various artificial epidemic(s) that were created to alert the public of their need for these so-called medicines in order to treat their newly discovered mental illnesses. He points out the amazing coincidental timing of the discovery of the widespread prevalence of these disorders in the public, parallel to the creation of a blockbuster to treat it. An epidemic of illness that is, of course, only just being fully understood, in the inevitable rush to treat it’s various manifestations sooner and better.

Is a rocket fuel compound called hydrazine the primogenitor of most modern ‘anti’ psych meds like antidepressants and antipsychotics and anxiolytics?

We are told of the industrial origins of these chemicals. Of how hydrazine led to iaprozid, a treatment for tuberculosis, and eventually became an ‘energizer’ pill. We learn how, depressed patients treated with iaprozid, and who suffered side effects like mania and psychosis for weeks, would eventually find their depression symptoms abated completely. Does that not sound at all similar to drugs like Paxil, Zoloft and Prozac? Takes a few weeks to kick in? May have psychotropic side effects in the meantime?

Whitaker explains how through lucky trial and error, phenothiazine, a compound sold by Dupont as a general pesticide became the miracle drug known as Thorazine. Thorazine worked so well as a ‘chemical lobotomy’ that previously delusional or aggressive patients could be released from institutionalization back into the community.

We learn about a happy pill called Miltown which eventually led to benzos like Valium and Lorazapam which trapped people in a feedback loop so that if they should try to discontinue they found themselves battling an agonizing addiction and withdrawal far more powerful than say, heroin, which many addicted prison inmates sweat out after their first week or so behind bars. Some people, we find, can never, ever discontinue psych meds no matter how much they want to, because if they try, their mind and emotions malfunction too much, and only another dose of the drug relieves that distress again.

Deeper in we learn of a super-trooper drug called methamphetamine that was issued to German soldiers in WWII during the winter to lessen fatigue, sharpen attention and keep up their morale which later became drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that young American teens, primarily boys, are forced to take to keep their wandering minds riveted on whatever their teacher is saying or doing in class.

Whitaker tells us about psychiatry’s arduous quest to become recognized as a legitimate science and their early treatments for insanity: from the dubious ‘ice bath’ to the Mengele-esque removal of organs, glands and teeth, to the biological shock treatments like insulin coma and electricity applied directly to the cranium to ‘loosen the pattern’ that psychosis had on the brain. Both methods reduced their patients to an infantile-like level of function, cured apparently, of their madness, at least temporarily, until the next episode or relapse.

Psychiatrists have long wanted treatments that work for specific conditions like antibiotics do for infections in internal medicine. Whitaker clearly explains how it is really only the mechanical dispensing of prescriptions for a growing pharmacopoeia of ‘anti-this’ and ‘anti-that’ drugs for unproven mental ‘diseases’ (an idea that sprouted from and was nourished by–eventually disproved theories about various chemical imbalances) that actually makes psychiatry a ‘real’ branch of medicine.

In the early to mid 90s Congress deregulated the pharmaceutical industry and ever since then the drug industry as a whole has been allowed to infiltrate nearly every form of media in existence with their advertising. The organizations that we would suppose exist to give us the straight dope on the science of mental illness and the real efficacy of medicinal treatments for it, like the FDA, APA and NIMH are, in fact, often seemingly in cahoots with them.

Granted, the FDA has occasioned to put Black Box warnings on drugs, usually, only after public outcry. When enough people have died, maybe a drug will get a warning on it. Although, an independent review board assessing the FDA’s decision invariably condemns the warning as ‘hasty’ and recommends more research first.

The APA courts Big Pharma because, as Whitaker tells us, it is Big Pharma that equips psychiatry with their only effective chemical treatments for the mental diseases they write about in their diagnostic bible—the DSM. Drug companies and psychiatrists are likely bedfellows and their marriage has been an unbelievably, obscenely profitable arrangement for participants on both sides–leading to countless conflicts of interests.

As in the case of Dr. Charles Nemeroff whose, as one snarky blogger once put it: “near-legendary prostitution of science to Big Pharma may hold some kind of record for the most conflicts of interest.” In reference to how much stock he owned in, and how many corporate boards he sat on, of various pharmaceutical companies, as he provided expert testimony on various issues and sucked up millions of dollars in consulting fees. Dr. Nemeroff never found a drug he couldn’t be paid to like and although his situation was extreme it is fairly endemic in the APA and was addressed by Loren Mosher years ago, in his now-infamous resignation letter from the APA.

While it is true that previous directors of NIMH have gone on record stating (paraphrasing), “There is no conclusive evidence that schizophrenia is related to a dopamine imbalance nor is there any conclusive evidence that antipsychotics correct said imbalance,” NIMH continues to toe the Big Pharma Party Line of mental disorders as chemical imbalances that need drug treatments even though they are aware that that relationship has been proven to be unsubstantiated by various studies and trials.

I remember very vividly one day around during the summer of ’95 or ’96, sitting in the waiting room at my chiropractor’s clinic and on an end table amongst a stack of adult magazines like ‘Cosmo’ I espied a children’s magazine called ‘Highlights’ that I had read as a kid. Out of nostalgia, I picked it up and started flipping through it and lo and behold, right smack in the middle of it, was a two-page advertisement for Prozac.

The left side was a child’s drawing. A representation of a white, grey and black dreary, rainy world complete with a house, dog, and front yard. In the yard was a clearly unhappy, unsmiling stick figure drawing of ‘Mommy’ and also concerned diminutive stick figures of mom’s kids, worry about mommy’s sadness evident on their simple, compelling faces. At the bottom of the scene advertisers for Eli Lilly ask, “Is mommy sad?” In case the imagery wasn’t obvious enough to any child.

The right side featured the exact same kid’s Crayola crayon drawing. Only now, the rain clouds were gone, a big round yellow sun was out and had a smiley face. Gone were the grays and blacks. The lawn was green. The house was red. The sky was blue. Mommy, the kids and the dog all seemed happy now. At the bottom of the advertisement, more crayon-style writing advised the child-reader to ‘tell Mommy about Prozac’.

Eli Lilly used artists and child psychologists to create an advertisement to prime little children into the medication modality and clearly tried to use these ads to communicate with kids what Prozac is and what it does and to get children to mention it to their mothers. The child ‘nag’ factor and mom’s tendency to take notice of that is covered in the book ‘Branded’ and is obviously part of that strategy.

Another obscene little fact is that Eli Lilly along with all the other pharma companies deliberately target women and mothers with antidepressant advertisements to make these otherwise healthy women want to be (even more) medicated. And evidence supports this trend. Right now, women are on twice as many antidepressants than men.

It started way back with ‘mother’s little helper‘ and continues to this day, with advertisements for Abilifry and Geodont showing thoughtful-looking young women walking down beaches or doing yoga and a sales pitch telling them they could only be more empowered if they added a neuroleptic aka ‘nerve clamp’ aka mindwipe-in-a-bottle to their antidepressant or antiseizure drug regimen for the ‘maintenance’ (as in never-ending) treatment of bipolar or depression.

Why has Congress not put the brakes on this and re-regulated this psychopathic, out-of-control, deceptive, calculating, money-hungry industry? It’s been over ten years since you guys deregulated them and we can not trust a single thing out of their mouths. Always the suppressed truth gets subpoenaed in court a few years later after the newly patented blockbuster rakes in billions of dollars and we find, again and again, no matter the drug, that it was less effective than we were led to believe and causes more problems than they claim to treat.

Is there not an obvious, repeating pattern here? Why are those of us without the power to change it the only ones who can see this? Why isn’t anyone in charge in our government who actually has power, taking notes and doing something about it?

‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ covers another hot-button issue that a lot of people are not even aware of. Social workers for Child and Family Services perform a service to families and communities and one of those services is to take children out of abused homes. All social workers have presumably read about how abused or abandoned children often present a plethora of mood and behavioral disorders. It’s part of their training.

A social worker then takes the child who has had an intervention, brings them to a psychiatrist, tell the doc the child clearly has depression, bipolar, autism, adhd, ptsd, or whatever they think the child is likely to have (based on whether the child is crying or scowling, talkative or quiet, aggressive or passive) and ask that the psychiatrist treat and prescribe for the newly minted Ward of the State. Then these kids are dropped off at foster homes with three, four, five and in some cases, many more psychotropic drugs the foster parents are told are needed to address the child’s illnesses.

This will interest the reader. All children and teens who become wards of the State are automatically covered by either Medicaid or Medicare until they are an adult. So the social worker gets these institutional psychiatrists to prescribe all those drugs to the child and the money that was paid to Big Pharma for the cost of those drugs comes right from your pocket because you subsidize Medicare with taxes.

Nearly every state in America seems to have a nice, neat, circular loop with Big Pharma. The state provides a continuously growing, constantly renewable source of child patients who ‘plainly’ are in dire need of polypharmacy. They get these kids on the latest most expensive blockbuster neuroleptics and moodstabilizers and you the citizen pay for it.

These kids have no say in their treatment. None at all. Most are never, ever told they they can refuse once they reach a certain age, fourteen, fifteen or sixteen. By the time they are an adult, you can bet their brains have been rewired with extra serotonin and dopamine receptors and they have a major multi-psychiatric drug addiction. They often have secondary iatrogenic diseases, like irreversible motor neuropathy, incredible obesity and diabetes and they become mentally and physically disabled adults, living in adult group homes and go right back on Medicare.

You know how I know all this? Because I am a former ward of the state and was a foster kid during the late 80s and early 90s and personally saw this growing epidemic of medicated kids with my own eyes while I was under the auspices of their care, living in group homes and residential placement facilities. I am a former ‘bipolar child’ and while I can’t tell you why social workers seem to have this drugging mandate, I can tell you that what Robert Whitaker is talking about in ‘Anatomy’ is just the tip of the iceberg.

I would say, if the government was actually serious about cutting down on the 800 some-odd new people being added to the disability rolls daily, that an immediate and total ban on forced polypharmacy medication for foster kids and wards of the state would be a good place to save some money and cut down on future disabled citizens. And because that ban did not happen today, a portion of the 800 people that will be added to disability by tonight includes those wards of the state and foster kids.

There are some serious, serious problems going on right now in this country that show no signs of changing as long as Big Pharma continues to have undue influence over the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychiatric Association.

‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ shows us, in careful, exquisitely researched detail, how we got here, from there, with today’s psychiatric pseudoscience, their fifteen-minute, drive-thru diagnoses and the resulting array of perpetual, addictive, and brain-altering maintenance treatments for them.

In the final analysis, ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’, like ‘Mad in America’, shows that psychiatry is the emperor with no clothes. Psychiatrists don’t have any special insight into how the brain works. None. Right now, it’s all about finding defective genes and their completely disproved chemical imbalance nonsense.

If you are not willing to lie down for some electroshock or submit to medication roulette, the truth is, there is nothing psychiatry can do for you. And they don’t like to admit it. That they paid for med school and the extra pharmacy education and yet their services are not needed to achieve a real mental recovery and their treatments cause more problems and quality of life issues than they mitigate.

The scope of the book asks us to levy skepticism of and carefully reconsider all that we think or know to be true today about the science behind mental illness, the actual efficacy of magic bullet treatments and the sudden occurrences of new epidemics of mental illness, hot on the heels of new drugs to treat them.

This treatise asks us to consider the realfact, not the goodfact. Not the facts the government has endorsed, but the facts readily available from studies, statistics, patient outcome surveys and anecdotal stories that are found in abundance in this amazing piece of critical journalism.

I can not recommend ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ enthusiastically enough. It’s brilliant, engrossing, and at times, very unsettling reading. It should make you upset. I cried more than once and wanted to put my fist through someone before I got halfway through it.

This book explains the who, what, why and how, that was the reasoning behind the mind-destroying effects I unwillingly suffered while being coerced inpatient, under repeated threats of restraints and forced injections, to take powerful doses of lithium and a neurolepetic called Trilafon as a teenager.

It explains in detail why I was told this great lie: That I could never recover from manic depression and schizophrenia; that I would always be afflicted, that my illnesses were the results of incurable hereditary genetic chemical imbalances. And why I had no choice but to take those drugs for the rest of my life.

A prognosis which was clearly in error, because here I am, twenty years after my Dx, completely healed of those conditions, symptom free for over a decade, without the use of any of those so-called ‘meds’.

But my diagnosing pdoc apparently didn’t know about Quaker retreats, Soteria houses or that according to Whitaker, Emile Kraeplin’s findings show that schizophrenic and manic depressive incidences were episodic and not chronic and incurable. It was not until the New Era reductionist model of biological psychiatry came and took over everyone’s opinions and told us what to expect: a lifetime of disability from those that are mentally ill, that it actually became so, and was written in all the new textbooks like an immutable fact of reality.

In fact, ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ shows us how, to this day, you are more likely to heal and recover from manic depression or schizophrenia if you DON’T take the medication-for-life route. Because it is polypharmacy roulette that is actually leading to lifetime disability, not mental illness itself.

Consider the stories we are told, that require some heavy-duty mental gymnastics, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance we acquire, the longer we research these different drugs.

For example, you’ve probably heard that ADHD meds are safe. If they weren’t, who would dare put little children on them right? But what are ADD meds? They are stimulants, analogs of methamphetamine. It’s revealed in their chemical names like dextroamphetamine–Adderall and methylphenadate—Ritalin.

We are told that these drugs are safe if used as directed, that is, for symptoms of ADHD. But it’s not safe for those without ADHD? Why is that? Is there something about the biochemistry of those with ADHD symptoms that somehow makes it safe?

While we think about that, consider this. I have known a few intravenous speed users and crank heads in my time. I dated one for awhile many years ago. One thing she told me in passing was that tweakers that are hard up for a fix will happily settle for snorting ADHD meds. It’s not entirely the same high, but close enough. Interestingly, if we GoAskAlice online and plug in the words ‘snort Ritalin’ we find a User generated question about the medical effects of inhaling ADHD stimulants.

GoAskAlice says: They include rapid heartbeat, aggression, psychosis and many of the other side effects one would get from shooting speed, snorting crank and tweaking. Then AskAlice reminds the User that it’s only a safe drug when used properly by ADHD patients.

Which again makes us wonder, how is Adderall or Ritalin all that different from tweak? What is it about an ADHD kid that makes them immune to tweaker side effects and dependency? Answers: they aren’t, and, nothing. They are taking speed just a like a doper on the street and the street doper will happily settle for grinding up and snorting those meds in a pinch because it quenches the dependency itch and gives them a buzz and the much touted super-concentration effect.

Personal story. My own brother was diagnosed with ADD in the 80s and briefly medicated for it with Ritalin. Side effects included loss of appetite and inability to sleep. My brother started wasting away like a tweaker, grinding his teeth, not eating or sleeping and any tweaker will tell you that’s part of the ride when you get hooked on meth.

People on various drug forums will tell you that Adderall, Ritalin and other stims cause ‘some kind of jaw touching, jaw grinding effect’ that leaves their mouth tired and sore. Sounds like meth to me. I experienced grinding teeth and jaws when I tried speed a couple times myself.

The rise of the ADHD epidemic and their methamphetimine analog treatments has created an entire generation of middle and upper class stim junkies who can’t even tell they are junkies. Big Pharma is not complaining though. It reminds me of Sarah Goldfarb on ephedrine from the movie ‘Requiem For a Dream’. “Ma, you’re grinding your teeth like a doper,” Harry tells her after she starts the weight-loss pills.

“They are just pills from my dahktah” she says. “He’s a nice dahktah.” And then my favorite part, Sarah says to her son, “How is it you know more about medicine than a dahktah?” Harry tells her, “Trust me mom, I know.”

Another great piece of consumer cognitive dissonance revolves around neurolepetics, the so-called ‘antipsychotics’.

Scientists did some studies a few years ago on the brains of macaques with a control group receiving a placebo and one group receiving Haldol and the other group receiving Zyprexa and not too surprisingly, six months later, the neuroleptic treated monkeys had brain damage. Pockets of interstitial fluid filled up spaces where healthy ganglion formerly existed.

Antipsychotics aka neuroleptics aka ‘nerve clamps’, are pesticides. Most neuroleptics are analogs of phenothiazines. We have known for a long time that phenothiazines were used in textile dyes. And that it was sold as a pesticide by Dupont and is used as an antihelminthic or de-worming agent.

If you want to know how a bug or worm feels when it is treated with a phenothiazine or piperazine derivative antipsychotic, go to youtube, look up videos on Tardive Dyskinesia and imagine experiencing that 1000 times worse. What do you think all the drooling, twitching, motor ataxia and shuffling gait is caused by? Are you going to tell me after hearing about people twitching and drooling uncontrollably and seeing TD in action in a video, that those people are not under the effects of or already harmed by, some kind of nervous system damaging agent?

Consider this, deep inside the full data sheets on antipsychotics is a warning. “Do not let the liquid version of this drug come into contact with skin or clothing.” But the data sheet never says why you shouldn’t do that. Could it be that dropping liquid concentrate neurolepetics onto your skin or clothes will stain or tie-dye or otherwise cause color changes in the skin or fabric? Imagine that. A chemical used in dyes, converted into a medicine that can’t come into contact with clothes because…?

We would put it all together and realize it’s not all that different from its textile and dye manufacturing cousin and not ‘medicinal’. Certainly not in a healing sense. You ever smell liquid perphenazine? If you have ever worked with industrial chemicals and I have in blue-collar factory jobs–I’ve handled acids, acetones and I can tell you right now, if you take a deep whiff of a liquid antipsychotic it smells like a solvent. You will never forget it if you smell it like that, it’s unique in its odor but totally something you might catch a whiff of in factories that work with metals, epoxies and etching chemicals.

Read between the lies. What Big Pharma does, is dilute that industrial toxin and tweak the molecule around a little and sell it as a treatment for mental illness. That’s all there is to it. And it’s why it hurts you and makes your brain fog up and your mouth dry and your hands to shake and makes you tired. It’s a very mild bug killer that you are playing Russian roulette with. If you get the chamber with the bullet, you come down with Tardive Dyskinesia, permanent central nervous system damage, to show for it.

For me, perhaps the single most useful piece of ammunition in this book to use against your NAMI and NIMH indoctrinated friends, family and coworkers is this:

The ‘psych meds for mental illness is like insulin for a diabetic’ analogy is the most closely held talking point for the pro-meds crowd and it is a lie. They have a mantra, “Insert X disease (ADHD, bipolar, OCD, schizophrenia) is a chemical imbalance that can be treated with drugs that address the specific imbalance.”

That mantra is provided by Big Pharma and is so thoroughly programmed into people, from senior citizens to junior high school kids, that you find, literally hundreds and thousands of people on the internet, on blogs, chatrooms, video comments and online news articles, all spreading this same lie every single day, 365 days a year, ‘Mental illness is a chemical imbalance. It’s like diabetes. You need meds to treat it.”

If psych meds are to psych patients like insulin is to a diabetic I should be as dead as a door nail now, because I had several ‘comorbid’ mental illnesses that ‘should have been’, but were never treated with psych meds during my early adult life.

Furthermore, what Whitaker deftly shows us is the exact opposite of this mantra. That according to the research, people with depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other thought or mood disorders do not have any kind of serotonin or dopamine imbalance whatsoever.

That if you measure dopamine and serotonin metabolites in recently deceased people who presented with depression or schizophrenia, they had normal amounts of those neurotransmitters. If you did the same thing to people who had spent months, a few years or decades under the influence of psych meds before they died, their blood metabolites showed they very much had a drug imposed serotonin or dopamine imbalance.

What actually happens to a person, when they start on an SSRI like Prozac or Zoloft, is that the drug scrambles normal serotonin function and the brain grows new serotonin receptors to compensate. Ditto for the dopamine D1 and D2 antagonists that comprise the neurolepetic drugs. When treated with so-called antipsychotics, a patient’s brain begins to grow more dopamine receptors to compensate for all the dopamine antagonizing going on.

This penchant the brain has, of actively trying to subvert the effects of psych meds by growing more receptors to achieve its normal balance has been documented. Whitaker makes mention of it as the brain’s ‘resistance to permanent adjustment’ and how this was first observed by pharma scientists. It’s partly why for some people, meds simply stop working after awhile and they feel compelled to try another drug formula that their brain has yet to adapt to.

But not everyone’s brain can subvert any psych med it encounters through this adaptation process. In fact, we hear about one guy who can never, ever come off of Klonopin because he suffers too much from the withdrawal. I personally know someone who took six years to come off an insane drug cocktail that was added or subtracted to for over twenty years. She is finally better and drug free, but is not yet physically well. Her body and mind has to completely adapt to the absence of a half dozen brain-changing chemicals that hurt her for far too long. The process is painful, but she is hopeful and so are those who support her.

‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’ has many facts to learn and spread to others.

• Fact: It is the drugs themselves that cause serotonin or dopamine imbalances.
• Fact: You are more likely to really heal if you keep your use of these drugs to a minimum or not at all.
• Fact: The longer you are on these drugs the more changes they make to your brain chemistry and neuronal firing.
• Fact: As you add one drug after another after another, your likelihood of experiencing some pretty shocking, disabling and disastrous unpredictable drug interaction events becomes perilously certain.

Bottom line: There is no chemical imbalance that causes depression and schizophrenia and by extension, their relatives like bipolar disorder. These ailments are not, repeat not caused by serotonin or dopamine imbalances and this book shows you why that is so. It is most certainly not true that you can never recover from schizophrenia. Or that once diagnosed, never undiagnosed, never healed, and that bipolar disorder or depression is doomed to haunt you forever.

Meds are not like insulin for diabetics and mental illnesses are not chemical imbalances. Those ideas are marketing pitches that clever ad people wearing office professional clothing came up with, not in a lab, but in a cubicle of a glass-walled corporate building.

When your teacher or parent or friend or psychiatrist tells you its a chemical imbalance, ask them, which chemicals? Insist that they tell you. If they won’t or don’t know, mention serotonin and dopamine, that should get them talking again. And then demand they explain how those two neurotransmitters are imbalanced. Then drop the bomb on them. Science has unequivocally proven that the drugs used to treat the conditions cause the very imbalance they claim to remedy.

If they refuse to believe, show them, in chapter and page, this book and make them see and acknowledge it. Highlight the relevant sections with a fluorescent marker. Point at them with your finger. You may have to do that for everyone you meet until people finally get it into their heads that they are being programmed by advertising and government special interests groups.

Tell them how it’s not just serotonin or dopamine either. Every one of the ‘anti’ psych meds: antidepressants, antipsychotics, antianxiety, antiseizure, from Depakote and Neurontin to Prozac and Wellbutrin to Lorazapam or Seroquel, is exciting or inhibiting circuits in your body that maintain and govern its function that have been hardwired into it through the process of evolution. The body has some ability to self-correct from this, but if it’s overwhelmed, overdosed, overmedicated, it stops doing that and becomes medically damaged in a process called ‘iatrogenesis.’ that can be permanent. Seriously, ask your doctor if Tardive Dyskinesia is right for your depression.

If you think I spoiled the book with my review, consider this, I barely scratched the surface of its contents and the issues it exposes and could go on at length, easily for another ten thousands words. I didn’t even go into the bipolar child thing. And how between Dmitri and Janice Papolos and Joe Biederman’s Harvard Mafia they have pretty much created pediatric bipolar disorder out of thin air.

Nor did I mention until now, that in ‘Anatomy’ we learn about sick Joe Biederman. A full professor who is ‘next to God’ who sits ensconced in the safety of the Harvard elite, performing mad experiments where he uses meth to induce tweaker episodes in kids, and if they get psychotic, it’s a positive litmus test for childhood bipolar. Once that dx is made, the child is put on neurolepetics and moodstabilizers, as a matter of course, ‘preventatively’.

Biederman’s whole mission seems to be to get young kids brains rewired on stims or bug killers or anti-seizure meds as soon as possible, for life. Don’t even get me started on Biederman’s ‘A child can be bipolar from the moment it opens its eyes as a baby,’ ideology. Why this modern-day Mengele has a medical license and is not behind bars I do not understand.

Tl, dr version. Amazing book. Should be required reading before any social worker, psychologist or psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse gets their wings to start practicing.

Buy this book. Read it. Get angry. Tell others. Then tell more. Reread it. Rinse and repeat. Even then you’ll still get people who stubbornly insist on denial. You can put this book in front of someone’s face but if they close their eyes, put their hands over their ears and shake their head and say “I’m not listening to you!” like Smeagol from ‘Lord of the Rings’ there’s not a lot you can do.