Oaktree1: tapering from Remeron while dealing with Cymbalta withdrawal

July 19, 2022

Hey @Oaktree1 How are you doing? Are you feeling any better? I'm concerned about the terrible heatwave you're having.

Thinking of you,

Arbor

July 19, 2022

Thanks for asking - I am doing a small bit better thanks keeping things quiet. It is hot where I am but not as bad as what the UK and parts of the continent - France, Spain etc are experiencing. It is ending today apparently at least where I am. Our rapacity as a species has finally outstripped the planet's ability to repair itself - very sad for the planet, the trees and other animal life that is not human.

I did two small .1mg cuts this month to make some progress on my taper of Mirt. Not too many side effects except a migraine after one cut that appears on day 3 of the cut. That has been very noticeable with other cuts too but did not happen at the last cut.

I hope your WD effects and particularly sleep are improving. I gather from your thread that they are with some waxing and waning.

Wishing you continual improvements in peace of mind and health over the next while.

Oaktree

July 19, 2022

Good to see a sign of life from you Oaktree. The heat is beginning in Denmark today, but nothing compared to what Central Europe are experiencing. Still I am bit worried about my cat. I hope they know to hydrate instinctively. I think it is cool (!) you keep cutting Mirt conservatively. I wish I was as low as you on Mirtazapine, and I can't wait to get there. Thoughts from Denmark.

July 19, 2022

30 minutes ago, Mirtazapine20mg said:

Good to see a sign of life from you Oaktree. The heat is beginning in Denmark today, but nothing compared to what Central Europe are experiencing. Still I am bit worried about my cat. I hope they know to hydrate instinctively. I think it is cool (!) you keep cutting Mirt conservatively. I wish I was as low as you on Mirtazapine, and I can't wait to get there. Thoughts from Denmark.

Hi @Mirtazapine20mg

Thanks for posting. I hope it's not too bad with the heat for you over there- my cats just find shade if they feel like it and I put cubes of ice in their drinking pan and put it in the shade. My bicolour loves the heat and would lie out all day if under shade. Apparently cats are good at dealing with heat and have an instinctive knowledge of how to handle it so i wouldn't be too worried about your cat. My older cat handled it very well but didn't eat much so I gave him milk instead. I suppose re the tapering it's just accepting that it's a long road. Apparently below 4mg is where the real fun starts with Mirt WD.

Anyway signing off now - I think your hold for a while is a good idea just to settle things.

Oaktree

July 19, 2022

Glad you're doing ok @Oaktree1 especially with your recent cut. Love hearing about your kitties. Mine is currently tapping my leg to come and play.

Big hug to you,

Arbor

August 12, 2022

@Oaktree1

Stopping by to see how you are doing?

August 15, 2022

On 8/12/2022 at 2:52 PM, Greatful said:

@Oaktree1

Stopping by to see how you are doing?

Thanks @Greatful

Thanks that's very kind of you to drop by - am keeping things a bit low key now so not posting much about my situation to try and keep the old amygdala which is always ready to blow up in check - I am continuing to reduce slowly.

My main physical symptoms at the moment are muscle tightness, migraine periodically and shoulder and hip pain because of tightness. I am doing Tai Chi for beginners and for those with arthritis and using my Jill Miller massage balls a lot - treated myself to a massage two weeks ago.

Touching wood I haven't had skin issues for a while now. I hesitate to post it here less fate strike me down but it's important for others trying to come off to hear something positive at times. I am keeping off alcohol which can be tough when the sun is out. Otherwise though I am treating myself to coffee and tea which I find I can tolerate at the moment.

I am glad that the TRE exercises seemed to have have provided some real relief for yourself from reading your own thread and your therapist sounds really helpful - all good things.

Oaktree 🌸

August 15, 2022

Thanks for this @Oaktree1! I've been wondering how you're doing. Your efforts to take care of yourself inspire me. My w/d agoraphobia has made me too reclusive. Good for you for plugging along with your taper.

Thinking of you,

Arbor

August 18, 2022

Thanks @arbor,

I hear you on the agoraphobia. It can be an effort to go out amongst people. I forced myself out for 2 walks yesterday but I don't make eye contact with people.

Someone up there must really hate me because having posted on Ninabird's (who has Covid) thread about being on the mend from Covid, I got a sore throat last night and tested positive for it again this morning a mere two months after I got the first infection.

I can't quite grasp it. I was at the sea for a few days last week but was only near people outside and only spoke to two people for a small bit - no other real contacts. The doctor told me that I would have immunity for three to four months when I saw her in late June. The dizziness is back. I think being under continual stress from (external factors) which I cannot control has something to do with it - my immune system must be very bad. I am very scared to have the vertigo back and hope it does not get worse. The physiotherapist told me that vertigo was largely controlled by one's fight or flight system (as it is near the amygdala) so maybe it is that that is raised too - well I know it is raised.

Anyway I was trying to keep my head down here as the first bout of Covid made me even feel more isolated, frightened and subsequently unfairly reactive to others - I hope I can survive another bout of it.

I hope you continue to improve Arbor and keep up the good fight.

Oaktree

August 19, 2022

Update to previous post and some info on Covid.

I don't have Covid. I didn't realise that if you check an antigen test after the 30 or 20 minute span allotted it is invalid - i.e. it shows such a tiny trace of virus as to be untransmissible or it is showing some other form of 'protein'. The three tests I did were checked well after the maximum time period allowed. Info may be useful to some. I am putting the dizziness down to the last cut I made four days ago. I clearly have another virus as I have sore throat and cold sores but thankfully it's not Covid.

Oaktree

August 19, 2022

Good news on not having a return of Covid. And congratulations on your latest cut @Oaktree1I hope your time at the sea was restorative. Thank you for posting. Your perseverance keeps me going.

Arbor 🌳

August 22, 2022

I shredded a beautiful silk cushion with a golf club by accident today; it was lost under the duvet covers and I was beating the bed with a golf club to get out some rage at my life circumstances; when I pulled the cover off and saw the shredded cushion I started bawling. It was a lovely cushion and now there are two long slits in it - it's ruined. The silk was fine and fragile and now it's mutilated.

I've been crying on and off all day. Alone all week and faced with moving house to a place where no one wants me and I can't bring my cats. A family member told me it would be good if I was dead - that replays in my head all the time; that and my 40th birthday - I will never forget that one - a big shot lawyer called up just at the start of the meal; my father left the table and my mother supported him in doing so; she took the bottle of wine off the table and carried it in on a silver platter into another room where my father and the big shot lawyer remained for the rest of the meal . I was told to get over it that - that it was no big deal. My sister didn't come - just sent an impersonal bunch of flowers. I rang her to thank her - three times - she didn't ring back.

Newsflash to any psychiatrist or psychiatrist in training out there:- many people who show up in your offices didn't have great parenting - maybe actually ask them about it before you slap the first of many labels on them and get them drugged up .

I've been reading the comments in MAD in America - they are mostly negative - voices in the wilderness; people whose lives have been destroyed by the mental health system; who've been labelled; who can't get their medical notes because the law is an ass; people who have been forcibly drugged. Most of them are very literate but most of them I think are probably disenfranchised - i.e. do not have wider involvement in society. That tends to happen quite a bit now if you get really stuck into the mental ill health system.

There is an article on a class action against the drug companies for the seratonin misinformation that is now being very quickly white washed. Would it have been better to have lived in the 18th century and gone into a private madhouse that might have been run under Philippe Pinel's moral education principles? Am I lucky that I was not a long stay patient in one of the district lunatic asylums in the 20th century? I have read up on it. In one county the patients were put to bed at six in the evening and most were observed by the health board inspector to disrobe on the ground floor and walk, some in mere shirts, and some naked up to the stairs to their beds on the second floor. (this would have been in the 1970's not the 1950's.) They slept serried together in dormitory beds.

In one mental hospital the patient's food was doled out to them with farm implements, not serving spoons, farm implements - spades and shovels like you'd use to feed a farm animal not a human being. Most never got out.

I went out briefly with the son of the head psychiatrist in one of these places. He was known as a 'very nice man' - yeah right. Middle class. Everyone in the family made the right connections - private schools, the right marriages; political alignments and this 'nice man' presided over the misery of the unwanted. I was in that mental hospital once for a debate when I was young and stupid. I had to walk through the basement to get to the lecture theatre - room after windowless room with these dejected elderly people staring into space, the reek or urine; the plastic chairs with cheap yellow foam protruding from rips in the seating. I walked through as fast as I could. I didn't think much about those old people staring into space as I was young with my whole life ahead of me and I thought I would never be like them. Then I walked into the theatre where there was a debating competition about 'mental health'. Obscene really - talking about mental health in a place like that.

Was it always awful for the mentally ill? A therapist I knew visited the local lunatic asylum every week with his wife. She had an aunt in there. She was put in very young - I think she was just very anxious. She spent here whole life in the asylum and every week the therapist's wife would buy a packet of Craven A cigarettes and a packet of soft fruit pastilles to bring as gifts when she visited.

Who are the mentally ill? Are they mostly people who aren't wanted? And of course there are some who are wanted and who are loved and who are supported. I met some of them in peer support groups. I remember one woman who came in to a group I attended. She was barely able to stand she was so drugged; her hand and arm shook all the time when she held the book used for the meeting. She was on so many drugs that I don't know how she managed her job as a nurse in an old person's home. But she told us that she asked her husband once - 'why do you put up with me?' And she told us that he said to her 'Well '(the woman's name), when you're in good form you're wonderful'. He supported her and loved her.

August 22, 2022

Dear @Oaktree1 I'm terribly sorry that you've had to go through such pain, and now are facing more. You're in my heart. Keep us informed.

Arbor 💜

August 24, 2022

Dear @Oaktree1

My heart goes out to you for what you have endured, and for the difficult situation you're in.

I may not pray in the traditional sense but I will be practicing my version of prayer for you to find a good, safe, stable place to live where both you and your cats are welcome.

Holding space for your experience and sending healing vibes <3

A.

August 30, 2022

On 8/22/2022 at 2:05 AM, Oaktree1 said:

Who are the mentally ill? Are they mostly people who aren't wanted?

Well @Oaktree1, I know I have been silent, but when I read your "life reports" I can't see anything but wonderfulness in you. We simply have to stick together, us in the wilderness. Even though I have taken a break from SA I feel right at home returning. As a child, 6 years or so, I had this "The Truman Show"-fantasy: Everybody went to work every day to create a fake reality around me, so they could observe how I behaved and reacted in situations: My mom, the woman who looked after me after school, preschool teachers - everybody. So when I went home from school, the actors making up school would be off for day, so fantasied, until I went to school the next day. I knew it was fantacy, on the other hand I found nothing that could falsify my theory. I have only found one other person, who had sort of this fantasy as child (he thought everybody was really monsters), but I have a heavy suspicion that it is very normal among us who didn't have the best of childhoods. If it was possible I would make a poll here on SA and ask: Who had "The Truman Show"-feeling as a child?

"The Truman Show"-feeling never left me in my day-to-day life, even though I don't think everybody has just arrived at work when I wake up to world. And the feeling is turned upside down: Everybody is naturally imbedded in the world except me and a few others, but I don't know who they are (I wish I did): In some sense I am waking up every morning to play my role in everybody else's reality. I know I will never get this naturally embedded feeling. I am on the outside and I am tired of trying to get on the inside. I am also on the outside of my family even though I play my role to perfection, so I don't think they suspect anything.

Why am I writing this? Well, because I think there is a strong element of non-embeddedness to 'mental illness' (I do not particularly like term mental illness). That is the one feeling I get from all the MAD in America stories, from the books I read written by people experiencing mental suffering, from blog posts, from SA life descriptions: "The Truman Show"-feeling: The reality of life is just a little off to be completely genuine.

I am so sorry you have to move. Moving is the worst of the worst, at least for me. It stresses the hell out of me. And to think you can't bring your cats makes my heart cry a little. I so wish I could help. But still, I see your future somewhere nice, safe and with your beloved cats. Somewhere where you can spot the silent child in the street, and just with kindness change her direction a few minutes of a degree so she can steer free of ADs and asylums in the future.

September 2, 2022

On 8/30/2022 at 1:50 PM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

Everybody is naturally imbedded in the world except me and a few others, but I don't know who they are (I wish I did): In some sense I am waking up every morning to play my role in everybody else's reality. I know I will never get this naturally embedded feeling. I am on the outside and I am tired of trying to get on the inside.

Yup - you describe pretty much my reality. Sometimes I felt I was beginning to be embedded - that I was finding my place but ultimately I got kicked out again and sometimes I kicked myself out feeling that I did not belong. Like yourself I am tired of the effort to fit in. But I haven't really accepted it either because I am not at peace with it. I'm lonely all the time. I never saw the Truman Show as I find Jim Carey too frenetic an actor for me but I read the plot and it resonated a bit. It's seems to be an allegory about being raised in fear in a society that prevents someone living an authentic life.

I was down at the sea again. It's a place where I went when I was young and there were some people I used to hang around with for a short bit while I was young and now they still go there. They are all married; drive expensive cars; the women in Range Rover or Volvo four wheel drives, the men in Audi's and Tesla's. They know and socalise with each other and their children in turn are starting the life cycle again - professional careers, houses and property portfolios, golf, and birth, deaths and marriages. When I walk to the place I swim I keep my head down so I don't have to meet or talk to any of them and I have my own place on the rocks. I am ashamed of what I became.

When I was growing up there was another man my parents were friendly with. He had a great sense of humour and was very outlandish and gregarious; he was very much in the social scene.

Well he lost his business; he drank and then he had what used to called a nervous breakdown During his last years when he walked up the streets of the town I grew up in he didn't speak to anyone. He kept his head straight ahead and pretended not to see anyone. I am like him except that I don't drink. How do you say to someone who asks what you are up to whose income is well over 250,000 grand a year? ' I am living on a disability payment'. I came from money. Now I have none; I have no partner or children and I couldn't get or stay in employment. Of course where I am being still a small place, it is known that I 'suffer from my nerves' partially thanks to my father broadcasting it all over the place in my 20's.

When I was first in the mental hospital in my 20's, I met another man that I had known from that seaside town. A really lovely man - he had a retail business. He too was part of that scene. His daughter was very kind to me when I began having real psychological difficulties in my late teens. Well this man lost his business through no fault of his own and I met him as an in patient in this hospital. We had both known each other in different days when he was full of bonhomie. Now he tried to smile but could not do it. I remember the humiliation of us all being made to do 'The Chicken Dance' in a hall for 'recreation'. He died from a heart attach not long after I met him in that hospital. That sounds like he died from the exertions involved in 'The Chicken Dance'. Can you think of a more humiliating thing to subject traumatised people to? To demand that they make stupid movements facing each other with a horrible tune playing in the background.

In our society particularly in 'middle class' society - there are entrance codes to get in and to stay there as far as I can see. They are career and marital success and when I say success I mean making money and marrying money. If you fail to keep up - you're out. You're in no-mans-land. Everyone is too embarrassed to talk to you. 'There but for the grace of God go I and all that'. You are still geographically present but people move around you as though you're not there.

Unlike yourself I tried to play my role and didn't succeed in playing it well. I agree with you about the non embededdness of those who end up in the mental health system. But as a child I didn't have the Truman Show feeling as there were enough people around me - older grandparents, my nanny, some other very kind people who looked after me and some friends until I was around 12 that helped me feel that I belonged. The feeling of not really fitting in only happened when I hit adolescence at 13 - it's never really gone away since.

Thanks for your comments on my cats. Nothing I can do about it unfortunately but thanks.

As I am posting here may as well say (hoping not to jinx things about Mirt) that my eczema has been in remission now for over 4 months and I am not having allergic reactions to shampoos and conditioners which I had been having for the past few years. I can wear jeans and other things with metal again. I know this is meant to be a site for coming off drugs so want to say something positive.

I am managing to sleep from 12 until 7am in the morning. I wake up early but mange to drift off again. That has been the case since June. I don't know why this should be as I have lowered the Mirt to 5mg now.

Otherwise as can be seen above, my mood is very low - I feel hopeless and frightened about my future and lonely but I can't differentiate what is a neuro emotion and what is related to my own mental state and my own life circumstances. I have to say that If had employment and hadn't had so many losses in the past few years and perhaps not had menopause thrown in on top of that, perhaps I would feel not so low. As i said here before I cannot differentiate what is a neuro emotion and what is an existing mental state.

I have been at 5mg now for 10 days or so and have decided to hold for another week. In the interests of transparency and because people disappear off this site without saying why or where they are going, I am not ruling out trying Lithium. My life circumstances are very poor and my prognosis in terms of employment or bettering them at this stage are poor but in order to bear that, a drug that blunted things or evened them out to enable me to bear bad circumstances is not something I am going to rule out. I have not decided yet but I am considering it and if I do decide to go ahead I will post it here - I am still wavering at the moment. I wouldn't do the Lithium Orotate but look for a low dose of Lithium 300 mg. Obviously If I decided to do that I would post my decision here and would not post anymore as this is a site for people who want to come off drugs not stay on them.

I know that if I had never been put on drugs in my early 20's and pulled into the psychiatric net that my mental health and life circumstances would not have deteriorated as much as they did. Irving Kirsch in an interview I saw yesterday said that people who have been exposed to psychotropic drugs tend to relapse at greater rates that those who have not been exposed to drugs at all. I have been on a lot of drugs and the question is now - given that the damage has been done to my CNS and given that I am now well into the last part of my life whether a drug that evens out my mood to the point why I am not feeling frighted and distressed a lot of the time would help. I am nervous of even posting this here but there it is.

Oaktree

September 2, 2022

5 hours ago, Oaktree1 said:

Yup - you describe pretty much my reality. Sometimes I felt I was beginning to be embedded - that I was finding my place but ultimately I got kicked out again and sometimes I kicked myself out feeling that I did not belong.

Your post is wonderful Oaktree, Lithium and all. Now I know what to do for night: Answer you. More to come.

September 4, 2022

Hi Oaktree

Like you I normally find Jim Carrey too much. But The Truman Show still works (and strangely also The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind). And Jim Carrey himself has fought a long hard battle. And when I learned that about him I was more forgiving. I do that: Like people a little more when I know their struggle. If you have time someday, The Truman Show is worth a watch. Sometimes something of value comes out of pop culture and I think the Truman Show is one example.

I do not come from money. Precisely because of that I think it is a good thing that we can connect. It means that our struggle transcends class. Actually I quite cherish your responses Oaktree. You describe life so vividly. I can with ease picture all of it.

Let me clarify about the Truman-feeling: I certainly had the thought experiment that everybody just was actors. I think the thought came because many seemed to be so predictable. Maybe it is a lower middle class phenomenon: Lower middle class is almost uniformly working class one step up the ladder, but still without any noteworthy education. And because of that everybody is extremely anxious and afraid to rock the boat: They have just arrived in suburbia and not ten wild horses are going to drag them out of there. They are going to walk the walk and talk the talk, God dammit. But that drastically narrows the spectrum of human emotions on display. Humans and their hierarchies and their striving: Nobody seems to realize the spectacle repeats itself all the way to the top and hence Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are the only ones who can alternately enjoy fulfillment.

So maybe I have given too much Freudian weight to my Truman-feeling as a child. I was indeed a little loner, but it didn’t bother me. I did have friends but I also liked my own company. I still like my own company. But I would like to have friends in my life today. Now I have what I would call very good aquatencies. But they are few and not really friends you would invite over for dinner.

Do I know the feeling of not looking your fellow man in the eyes? Absolutely. I have also lost all my friends from prior. Not because they didn’t want to have anything to do with me but because I have saved both them and me the embarrassment. I have days where I hope I can get to the grocery store without meeting anybody. A lot of days. I have days where I just dream about being a vagabond. Go all the way so to speak. This dream I think one will find in different variations among many non-embedded people.

My non-embeddedness was also a beginning adolescence thing. Prior to that I had my role as a little grown up who was good at math and writing essays. But when puberty hit I just couldn’t make WHAM work for me. It was as if everybody around me found their ‘puberty identity’ but I couldn’t and got lonely. It was not a good time. I still fell in love, still wanted to be a part of the crowd, but I couldn’t.

For many years it haunted me that I didn’t pursue a career, a fancy car and portfolio. But at the same time I was angry because my portfolio owning friends sold out. I just couldn’t see myself working for a big company and I know I would be miserable doing so. It would be one long pathetic ‘trying to fit in’ attempt. So I chose to write ph.d. But then I got really ***** and really depressed (universities today are big companies producing the largest amount scientific papers in shortest amount of time, and the quality control is close to non-existent. Your ordinary garbage psychiatry-psilocybin paper is no exception). And for me it is as if there is no way to cross the border to normality again. I can live sane, but not live sane normally.

I liked my years as an undergraduate and graduate student, because university for me was the first time education made sense. High School was both socially and educationally a disaster. In primary school everything was so simple that you could understand it without much explanation. In high school you needed an explanation but you were never given one (there were exceptions of course). I especially remember the math proofs in High School. I could see they were right, but I simply couldn’t understand how they got the ideas to make the right steps at the right time in the proof. It bothered my math brain for a really long time and I got convinced that math - that I used to love - wasn’t my game. Much older, when I half assed revived my interest in math, I learned that there is a lot of trial and error in making a math proof and I also saw an interview with Terence Tao and he also had the same problem with math proofs in high school. So maybe I could have been a happy midrange engineer today - with a Tesla and a portfolio and all. Who knows.

I always had the feeling from the age of 13 (maybe 14 or 15, I don’t remember precisely) that something was wrong but for many years I sort of succeeded in being normal in spite of this inner wrongness. I fought for embeddedness and it worked, at least for relatively long time spans. Much like you I gather. And I always believed that someday the feeling of wrongness would disappear. But being embedded for me was such hard work that there was no room for anything else or very little at least. And a ph.d. was too much and things fell apart. I actually began to drink. I think it is the prefered masculine way to solve problems. I didn’t drink continually, but in short bursts when I got the “go to hell world”-feeling. Then I would stop only to begin a couple of months later. Today I do not drink and have not done so for many years. I like not to drink. There is a certain coolness to it, I think. But it got me thinking about the men you described. I think a lot of people begin to drink when they blame themself for something over which they have no control. If only they could say: it was not me, it was only bad luck.

I am so happy to hear that your mirtazapine problems are slowly resolving. And envious. But it also gives me hope. And a little smile on my face. I don’t think you are jinxing anything. Gigi68 is reporting the same resolving problems the lower she goes. I am still stuck on 17 mg. I will stay there at least until I get a healthy sleep pattern. I fully understand your considerations regarding Lithium. As you might know, giving lithium to people is originally a Danish idea. I myself once considered it, but found it too harmful to the body (the toxicity, blood test and all that). I know it is sort of stupid, because I have had no health concerns taking brintallix or mirtazapine, but they could be just as harmful - we just dont know it yet.

Regarding mirtazapine: I have studied your signature, and as far as I can tell your initial dose was 7,5 mg, but how long were you on it before you switched to liquid Oaktree? And your signature also says that you use a liquid suspension with maple syrup. Are the liquid pharmacy made? Or do you make a suspension by dissolving pills? I ask because I am reducing by dissolving pills myself and I have a suspicion that this method is creating variability in the dose I get (or what is bio-available to my body). At the moment I am a little lost on how I am going to get rid of the last 17 mg. The road seems so long and bumpy.

Even though I flirt with the idea of taking some sort of new antidepressant (I did so just a few days ago) I would not do it. My view today is that our pharmacological or neurobiological knowledge is not at a level where we can make people's lives better with drugs. Maybe someday in the future, but not at present. I also saw the roundtable discussion with Kirsch, Moncrieff, Horowitz and Delano and your point about being harmed by prior use of psychotropics in a way where lithium actually would help your current situation is completely valid in my opinion. But it is also a bit of a long shot. And what Kirsch didn’t say was that people already harmed by drugs would have a better outcome if they took some more. I am of this view: Yes, the drugs have made everything much worse than they would have been otherwise, but those ****ers are not going to win. In this case and few others: Thank God for the internet. Without SA, Inner Compass etc I would certainly be drugged out of this world and into the next galaxy and probably living my life in some ‘modern’ asylum. Only because I got water in my legs (my doctor said I was just getting older!) did I begin to research seriously on the side effects of mirtazapine and from there it snowballed.

I calculated the probability of getting at least one heavy side effect from mirtazapine. So for example the probability of somnolence is 43% as far as I remember. Conversely the probability of not being somnolent on mirtazapine is 57%. The probability of peripheral edema (water in the legs) is 8% percent, conversely not getting it 92%. So the probability of neither getting sedated nor getting edema is ,92*,57=,48 (48%). Then I just went on with all the heavy side effects of mirtazapine, and when I was finished there was a 23% probability one would not get at least one nasty side effect from mirtazapine. Or 77% chance you would. But here is the catch: In the package insert they only report the probability of the individual side effects and then they seem small and unimportant. Never the cumulative probability of getting any side effects. Even worse: They use labels as “rare”, “very rare”, “uncommon” or “common”. So the patient has no possibility of assessing the risks they are exposing themselves to. Btw, my impression is that GPs are evaluating the risks the same way it is done on the package insert. To top it all off, these side effects are only the ones the pharmaceutical companies observe in short term clinical trials. Not the day in and day out, year after year side effects. After that I decided the psychotropics had to go.

Erich Fromm once said that most normal people show the symptoms of mild schizophrenia: They resistanceless accept society and life as given: They go to work, go home, eat, watch TV and go to bed. Next day repeat, only interrupted once a year by a somewhat stressful 3 week trip abroad. I think there is some truth to that: There is a certain zombification of the Tesla-crowd.

But I am also almost certain there is an under-socialized component to mental health problems, hence the non-embeddedness. What to me seems as a zombification from the outside is also partly a product of me being non-embedded: The zombification is not that pronounced, it is me, from the outside, who doesn’t see what else is going on. The under-socialization that comes with mental health problems is a problem in and of itself. You slowly lose your ability to decipher the unspoken social code. You either get too friendly too fast. Or the opposite: You are too reserved in social situations that demand a little more intimacy. The overarching question always is: Am I doing this right? At the same time I often ascribe information value to signals that have none: That look in her eyes probably means I said something wrong. Or I said it in the wrong way. Oh no, what do I do?

To not get the social code of what can and cannot be said (and how it can be said) is one of the most anxiety provoking social experiences for a human being, I believe. Take a lower middle class woman to a wine and dine a few steps up restaurant, and she gets the same frightened look in her eyes my cat gets when she hears threatening heavy machinery. I did it once. She managed to be under and over dressed at the same time, and had you measured her blood pressure, you would get a reading 240/130. She enjoyed nothing. The dearest moment from that night was seeing the relief in her composure when she sat foot on the pavement outside afterwards. She smiled and laughed again and everything was good.

These days it is me who has the heavy machinery look in my eyes. I can even get it when I post something here on SA. Shouldn’t I have written that? Am I breaking some unwritten rule for good SA posts? Am I careful not to offer advice, but only support and my own experience (you Oaktree, is in another category :-)? Even when I swear (****) I can get SA code anxiety.

So here it is: We have the original trauma that led to mental problems, the trauma of having mental problems, the trauma of being drugged under false pretenses for mental problems, the trauma of all the crazy **** we did on the drugs (maybe the worst trauma, in my case anyway) and finally the trauma from withdrawing from these drugs. That is quintuple trauma. How the **** do we crawl out under that rock?

Personally I am 100% certain I am going to need the big guns. No flimsy dreaming about normality is going to cut it. If I don’t take the extent of the damage seriously I do not stand a chance. I know this because every time I give an inch to “come on, you can live normal” it ****s me up. For me there is only ‘SA discipline’ left: Food, sleep, exercise, quality reads. Arete.

But I know there is good life hidden in that. You lose some, but you certainly also win some. I have just been to my yearly physical and it was a triumph of unseen proportions (compared to myself 15 years ago when I smoked, not compared to your ordinary 20 year old vegan health freak). Last week there was a big scandal at the harbor where I live because somebody had written something on FB and only by accident did it consume a measly 2 minutes of my life because I do not have FB (way to triggering). I look at cardio-vascular disasters visiting our habor to buy ice cream and I am grateful for my rather restricted diet. I hear my neighbors television through the wall and I am happy I don’t have one (the blue light from televisions through windows always gives me dystopian associations). I see couples sitting on their balconies drinking one bottle of wine, then two, then they fight. I go for a walk with my cat, who proudly climbs a couple of trees just to show off. I look at my brother's two sweet kids but they don’t look at me. They look at their iphones and I think well, there is Lundbeck's new market.

Finally Oaktree: The Chicken Dance. WTF? It is so sick, so distorted. Every patient grasps for dignity and anything dignified, because they often feel they have none. And they offer the chicken dance? It is just cruel. I remember in one of your posts you asked if our earlier treatment of mentally ill was so much worse than our current treatment. I would any day prefer to be hosed down with icy water than do the chicken dance. I have always thought that psychological abuse often is worse than physical abuse (which of course is a travesty in itself). It is not more than 55 years ago that physical punishment in Danish schools was forbidden. I have never been sure that was true progress. It was by and large replaced by psychological punishment.

September 4, 2022

Btw Oaktree, you I do not expect a response or anything. It was therapeutic just to write. 😀

September 6, 2022

Hey Oaktree - I have some reading to do - but don't have the time right now -

But you said lithium.

As someone who was lithium poisoned, I have an alternate suggestion.

Perrier & San Pellegrino waters have lithium, not enough to be "therapeutic" but might help. We have a member who just started this. You can take 1/4 bottle a day or a whole bottle. NOTE: There is fluoride in these waters, I try and avoid that.

Also: Lithium Orotate - John Grey (of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" fame) swears that just 5 mg a day will support your mood and help you get better. I took less than this for 2 years. 5 mg is almost at a level that you don't need blood tests.

If you can do it without a doctor (who will have doctorly ideas about "therapeutic range"), all the better.

I'll be back when I have more time for reading . . .

I hope you see the sun today!

JC

September 7, 2022

On 9/4/2022 at 9:00 AM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

And because of that everybody is extremely anxious and afraid to rock the boat: They have just arrived in suburbia and not ten wild horses are going to drag them out of there. They are going to walk the walk and talk the talk, God dammit. But that drastically narrows the spectrum of human emotions on display. Humans and their hierarchies and their striving: Nobody seems to realize the spectacle repeats itself all the way to the top and hence Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are the only ones who can alternately enjoy fulfillment.

Hi Mirtazapine20mg,

I am not so good at this copy quote thing but I enjoyed reading that paragraph particularly the conflation of suburbia with wild horses - one associated with conformity and the other with its opposite. It's a good description of the animal urges behind the need to wash one's car every weekend.

On 9/4/2022 at 9:00 AM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

I liked my years as an undergraduate and graduate student, because university for me was the first time education made sense. High School was both socially and educationally a disaster. In primary school everything was so simple that you could understand it without much explanation. In high school you needed an explanation but you were never given one (there were exceptions of course)

It was the opposite for me but it was interesting to read about your academic career. I was much too scared to understand much of what went on in my primary school for the first seven years as there was liberal corporal punishment if you were unlucky enough to have a female teacher. I lived in fear most days of being beaten with a 'slata'. That's the Gaelic word for stick. One female teacher used hers to often that it was cambered at each end and greasy from use. If you had a male teacher you were safe as they would never hit the girls.

I flourished only in the secondary school - the rote learning suited me - and crashed horribly in University where my inability to edit the essential from large reading lists was my undoing.

You sound like one of the 'gifted' as you found High School simple and it's interesting that you had the sort of lateral brain that could use a different method to get to the correct answer.

On 9/4/2022 at 9:00 AM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

They are going to walk the walk and talk the talk, God dammit. But that drastically narrows the spectrum of human emotions on display. Humans and their hierarchies and their

On 9/4/2022 at 9:00 AM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

And for me it is as if there is no way to cross the border to normality again. I can live sane, but not live sane normally.

Oh i have gotten those paragraphs mixed up again!

I know there is a name a figure of speech for that wonderful phrase you have used above - 'I can live sane, but no live sane normally'... I have gotten it now from Wikipedia - a paradox. You express so well the contradictions in living if one struggles to fit in.

I sense a wistfulness for the Tesla and portfolio (it is nice to belong and fit in) although you do acknowledge later in your post (have giving up trying to reproduce the paragraph as it keeps deleting itself) that people can blame themselves for things that were not their fault and take to the drink as we used to say in this country.

I am trying to match your originality of thought but all I can come up with is that life can be full of 'what ifs' and 'if only this or that had happened' and I think now at this point that chance and luck play a big part in the life we end up with. Although some Greek ancient wrote that 'character is destiny' so who knows really.

On 9/4/2022 at 9:00 AM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

Much like you I gather. And I always believed that someday the feeling of wrongness would disappear. But being embedded for me was such hard work that there was no room for anything else or very little at least. And a ph.d. was too much and things fell apart. I actually began to drink. I think it is the prefered masculine way to solve problems. I didn’t drink continually, but in short bursts when I got the “go to hell world”-feeling.

I am very sorry to hear about the PH.d although you express elsewhere a certain cynicism with the University system being little more than a degree mill. Every second person here now has some sort of a MA or is studying for PH.d through online learning and the costs are phenomenal. I don't know seeing as you still seem to have a love for Maths whether it might be something you might revisit - not to become embedded of course - but for yourself and your own enjoyment.

I struggled to get my basic Arts degree - seven years and two nervous breakdowns. I was failing my courses, failing socially, failing at acting and I was only too glad to see a psychiatrist so I could go 'off books' and not be officially kicked out of college which I was going to be before the psychiatrist sent in the requisite letter that I was too 'unwell' to continue. Now I wish I had been kicked out as I was clearly unable for it but was too proud to admit it. I was told by an educational psychologist that I should only attempt a pass degree after my first year and a brief IQ test - that was a shock. So I would not be in the 'very bright' category like yourself. Everything for me was a huge effort.

I have known a lot and I mean a lot of male drinkers, one very close friend, my last friend actually who simply could not stop when he started and was eventually put off the road and of course there are loads and loads of alcoholics on both sides of my family. My ex-friend stopped drinking and now has an exemplary life - a house, wife and all the trimmings. I applaud you for giving it up. I am glad you enjoy not drinking.

On 9/4/2022 at 9:00 AM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

But I am also almost certain there is an under-socialized component to mental health problems, hence the non-embeddedness. What to me seems as a zombification from the outside is also partly a product of me being non-embedded: The zombification is not that pronounced, it is me, from the outside, who doesn’t see what else is going on.

I enjoyed reading that paragraph and found the one following it very funny - the one about the woman you took to dinner. You describe things so well - the mildly schizophrenic zombification of the 'Tesla' crowd and whether you yourself are the one that doesn't get it because of social isolation. You describe so vividly what happens if someone becomes unused to human contact.

I was sad to read that you had removed yourself from the company of people you knew before to save them the embarrassment although as you could see from my previous post this is largely what I have done too. I suppose when people of a certain type who are successful in playing a certain social game play it long enough they develop a kind of a telepathy between each other. I think there's some name for it in organisational psychology - a form of group dynamics.

You can see it in a wider sense in the lifestyle section in the weekend newspapers - if you are apart from it long enough you no longer understand it. I used to attend exercises classes with affluent young mothers and ladies who were not so young but were well heeled with multiple holidays per year and fresh manicures. There was the odd invitation to join for coffee but I never went - they were nice women but I would have nothing to say to them- no commonality of interest.

Well it is late now and I hope to answer more fully in the next few days in relation to your queries about Mirtazapine. I am not good at following written instructions so I went onto Facebook and watched the video on the support group ' Mirtazapine - support recovery' about how to make a liquid. I dissolve two 15 mg tablets in a mixture of 15ml water and 15 maple syrup. I don't need to explain the measurements to you as you are a math's person ( I would have LOVED to have had a math's brain). The maple syrup apparently acts as a suspension agent to allow the drug to disperse evenly (I believe it is because it adds 'weight' to the liquid). I have been using that method anyway as you cannot get liquid Mirtazapine in this country.

I am just recovering yesterday and today from a really vicious migraine that started last Sunday - my physio said she had never seen my neck and back so locked up - thank goodness for the physio.

I love the 'heavy machinery' metaphor for awkward social communication - that is very apt.

Oaktree

September 11, 2022

On 9/2/2022 at 1:48 PM, Oaktree1 said:

Yup - you describe pretty much my reality. Sometimes I felt I was beginning to be embedded - that I was finding my place but ultimately I got kicked out again and sometimes I kicked myself out feeling that I did not belong. Like yourself I am tired of the effort to fit in. But I haven't really accepted it either because I am not at peace with it. I'm lonely all the time. I never saw the Truman Show as I find Jim Carey too frenetic an actor for me but I read the plot and it resonated a bit. It's seems to be an allegory about being raised in fear in a society that prevents someone living an authentic life.

I was down at the sea again. It's a place where I went when I was young and there were some people I used to hang around with for a short bit while I was young and now they still go there. They are all married; drive expensive cars; the women in Range Rover or Volvo four wheel drives, the men in Audi's and Tesla's. They know and socalise with each other and their children in turn are starting the life cycle again - professional careers, houses and property portfolios, golf, and birth, deaths and marriages. When I walk to the place I swim I keep my head down so I don't have to meet or talk to any of them and I have my own place on the rocks. I am ashamed of what I became.

When I was growing up there was another man my parents were friendly with. He had a great sense of humour and was very outlandish and gregarious; he was very much in the social scene.

Well he lost his business; he drank and then he had what used to called a nervous breakdown During his last years when he walked up the streets of the town I grew up in he didn't speak to anyone. He kept his head straight ahead and pretended not to see anyone. I am like him except that I don't drink. How do you say to someone who asks what you are up to whose income is well over 250,000 grand a year? ' I am living on a disability payment'. I came from money. Now I have none; I have no partner or children and I couldn't get or stay in employment. Of course where I am being still a small place, it is known that I 'suffer from my nerves' partially thanks to my father broadcasting it all over the place in my 20's.

When I was first in the mental hospital in my 20's, I met another man that I had known from that seaside town. A really lovely man - he had a retail business. He too was part of that scene. His daughter was very kind to me when I began having real psychological difficulties in my late teens. Well this man lost his business through no fault of his own and I met him as an in patient in this hospital. We had both known each other in different days when he was full of bonhomie. Now he tried to smile but could not do it. I remember the humiliation of us all being made to do 'The Chicken Dance' in a hall for 'recreation'. He died from a heart attach not long after I met him in that hospital. That sounds like he died from the exertions involved in 'The Chicken Dance'. Can you think of a more humiliating thing to subject traumatised people to? To demand that they make stupid movements facing each other with a horrible tune playing in the background.

In our society particularly in 'middle class' society - there are entrance codes to get in and to stay there as far as I can see. They are career and marital success and when I say success I mean making money and marrying money. If you fail to keep up - you're out. You're in no-mans-land. Everyone is too embarrassed to talk to you. 'There but for the grace of God go I and all that'. You are still geographically present but people move around you as though you're not there.

Unlike yourself I tried to play my role and didn't succeed in playing it well. I agree with you about the non embededdness of those who end up in the mental health system. But as a child I didn't have the Truman Show feeling as there were enough people around me - older grandparents, my nanny, some other very kind people who looked after me and some friends until I was around 12 that helped me feel that I belonged. The feeling of not really fitting in only happened when I hit adolescence at 13 - it's never really gone away since.

Thanks for your comments on my cats. Nothing I can do about it unfortunately but thanks.

As I am posting here may as well say (hoping not to jinx things about Mirt) that my eczema has been in remission now for over 4 months and I am not having allergic reactions to shampoos and conditioners which I had been having for the past few years. I can wear jeans and other things with metal again. I know this is meant to be a site for coming off drugs so want to say something positive.

I am managing to sleep from 12 until 7am in the morning. I wake up early but mange to drift off again. That has been the case since June. I don't know why this should be as I have lowered the Mirt to 5mg now.

Otherwise as can be seen above, my mood is very low - I feel hopeless and frightened about my future and lonely but I can't differentiate what is a neuro emotion and what is related to my own mental state and my own life circumstances. I have to say that If had employment and hadn't had so many losses in the past few years and perhaps not had menopause thrown in on top of that, perhaps I would feel not so low. As i said here before I cannot differentiate what is a neuro emotion and what is an existing mental state.

I have been at 5mg now for 10 days or so and have decided to hold for another week. In the interests of transparency and because people disappear off this site without saying why or where they are going, I am not ruling out trying Lithium. My life circumstances are very poor and my prognosis in terms of employment or bettering them at this stage are poor but in order to bear that, a drug that blunted things or evened them out to enable me to bear bad circumstances is not something I am going to rule out. I have not decided yet but I am considering it and if I do decide to go ahead I will post it here - I am still wavering at the moment. I wouldn't do the Lithium Orotate but look for a low dose of Lithium 300 mg. Obviously If I decided to do that I would post my decision here and would not post anymore as this is a site for people who want to come off drugs not stay on them.

I know that if I had never been put on drugs in my early 20's and pulled into the psychiatric net that my mental health and life circumstances would not have deteriorated as much as they did. Irving Kirsch in an interview I saw yesterday said that people who have been exposed to psychotropic drugs tend to relapse at greater rates that those who have not been exposed to drugs at all. I have been on a lot of drugs and the question is now - given that the damage has been done to my CNS and given that I am now well into the last part of my life whether a drug that evens out my mood to the point why I am not feeling frighted and distressed a lot of the time would help. I am nervous of even posting this here but there it is.

Oaktree

I was reading Your most recent posts, will read the rest of them today, or at least I will try as I am currently in a wave, but had a thought, I don't know if this was proposed earlier, if so ignore me, but maybe You should do a longer hold, to give Yourself some time to breathe, I read Rhiannon's topic some months ago and she is strongly recommending to take longer breathers from time to time.

Apart from that I agree with You and Mirtazapine20mg, trying to fit in is hard, and something that cost me my mental health, as trying to fit in was what pushed me to start drinking in my teens, as almost everybody was doing it, then smoking weed, as again everybody 'cool' was doing it, and finally in my young adult life some harder drugs, as my 'friends' were doing it, I was last to do all of these things, but what does it matter...

I am actually sad that I didn't choose to be an outcast in these years, and really hope that some day we will see a real shift in society to stop treating psychotropic drugs as recreation even in moderation.

Wishing You a lifelong window!

V.

September 11, 2022

On 9/7/2022 at 11:09 PM, Oaktree1 said:

well heeled with multiple holidays per year and fresh manicures.

LOL. Sorry I haven't been around Oaktree, but I have had a sh*tty week. Thank you so much for your answer. This morning it took away my morning anxiety. I will write back sometime during the week. Just have to get a little strength back.

September 16, 2022

On 9/11/2022 at 6:34 AM, Vasherr said:

I am actually sad that I didn't choose to be an outcast in these years, and really hope that some day we will see a real shift in society to stop treating psychotropic drugs as recreation even in moderation.

Hi Vasherr

Well I suppose everything is relative - I didn't chose to be an outcast - it just kind of happened when all my friends gradually dumped me after I had two breakdowns in my 20's and then my family did the same and it hasn't changed since really. Today I am really lonely and don't have anyone.

I am actually scared of most of family and the one that happens to be a practising psychiatrist - well lets just say - I am terrified of them. The power these people have is pretty much limitless. I don't know how much longer I can last really as my future seems completely hopeless.

I wish I had tried some 'hard drug's at least had some 'fun' along the way although I think you are still saying that you still felt alienated when fitting in. I hope your wave passes soon.

I think drugs are here to stay for as long as our civilization lasts and some MIT study done in the 70's and recently revisited states that it will end probably around 2040 - thank goodness. I don't think there will be much to regret about it ending. I think you were right about holding and I have held at 5mg and will probably stay at that a bit longer.

@Mirtazapine20mg - well your 'sh**** week was a while ago - I have just had a really sh**** day. I actually watched the A Disorder for Everyone' festival today. Eventually I had to turn it off - I found it really, really triggering particularly a presentation given by a psychologist called Jacqui Dillon on iatrogenic harm. She was ritually abused as a child and ended up in the mental health system where of course her distress was pathologised. Now like me she had permanent labels on her medical file and she was disbarred from giving evidence against her childhood abusers because she had a psychiatric label. And this is a lady who is not even living on disability. She is an honorary fellow in psychology, has written several well received books and lectures and writes extensively. In other words she had a strong public profile and a body of work; she has worked in the mental health system for years and is a functioning person but she was still disbarred from giving evidence.

There was very little optimism in general from all the clinician's that took part which was disheartening. I don't know if you tuned in. I didn't hear Robert Whitaker as I needed to take a break. He was I understand a bit more upbeat than the others. Joanna Moncrieff sounded really angry and quite upset at the way psychiatrists as a whole have defenestrated the work that she and Horowitz did on the chemical imbalance. You know the line that is being trotted out now....'the chemical imbalance was debunked years ago...but anti depressants still work....to say otherwise is fear mongering ...and Joanna Moncrieff is the voice of the extreme group of anti psychiatrists....blah blah blah'. She is angry that they've been presented with the truth but are still continuing on anyway to drug their patients without any real informed consent.

Well...you know Hannah Arendt's line about the banality of evil I suppose. This is the modern version and it's been ongoing ever since Thorazine came on the market in 50's. And the psychiatrists go home in the evening most of them in their high performance cars to see the spouses and their children and all is all right with the world. Why do I get the image of Commandants Rudolph Hoss's nice cosy family home in the surroundings of Auschwitz.

Nazi Germany lasted from 1933 - 1945 but the psychiatric system - how long has it lasted? I know Bedlam was opened in London in 1215 but they only really started to industrially shove people in asylums in the 19th century. Then we had all the materialistic tortures - the spinning chair and the early water shock therapies; then in the 1920's and 30's we got ECT, in the 1950's insulin comas and lobotomy and then the first neuroleptic in 1955 - Thorazine and from then on we've had the tricyclics, then Lithium, then the SSRI's, the SNRI's', the new generation anti psychotics, the anti convulsants; then drugs that have anti psychotics and SSRI's properties and now that all these drugs have ruined and damaged generations of people and most crucially appear to be ineffective and are now out of patent anyway, they're going to turn to psilocybins to ruin a whole new generation and what's left of the brains of the older generation.

Now all those elderly people in care homes, those disturbed kids in care, the prison publication who were previously on chemical coshes of Risperdal or Seroquel; they'll all have patented psilocybins added to the mix and a whole generation of shrinks and pharma execs will get rich and powerful. They're already having a trial of it in the greatest Irish psychiatric hospital in the world - St Patricks. Now anyone who needs ECT from around the country gets funneled to this hospital - it's lucrative.

I don't think psychiatric patients can be compared to people in the Holocaust. I think the only real comparison is that of the African slaves in the Americans South - 400 years of dehumanization. It's only really in the last 10 to 20 years that people are waking up to the horror of that but it went on for centuries. I don't think despite the evidence that anything is going to change and from listening to people who work in the 'mental health industry' today they seem disheartened. I heard of from an English former psychiatric nurse living in Australia Matt Ball with personal lived experience. When I last saw him speak he was actively engaged in trying to reform the mental health system. Today he and his interlocutor Indigo Daya, another activist with lived experience who had worked in the system for years both appeared to convey that they regretted all the years they had spent trying to reform the system, that their work and their evidence had been co-opted into the toxic whole without any real change such that both have now disengaged. Matt is no longer practising as a psychiatric nurse. I found that really disheartening. They say the system cannot be reformed. It really needs to be dismantled but in the ensuing presentations and round table discussions all clinicians were most of them deeply pessimistic that such a system linked as it is to culture that is driven purely by the profit motive could ever be constructed anew.

That is the banality of evil right there...the trudging behemoth of labelling and drugging and limiting of potential by layers of nurses and psychologists and psychiatrists and even more sinister the widespread training of 'mental health officer's in the workforce that are trained to spot people who might be suffering from 'mental health difficulties' and need 'treatment'. The pharma companies have worked out their marketing well. One of the psychologists Dr Lucy Johnstone in particular noted that in young people there is a real desire now to embrace their psychiatric label as a means of identity - that makes me feel profoundly sad. The drug companies have paid a lot of money to anti stigma campaigns on 'mental health' which has probably contributed to it. In other words very little hope there for real change.

I have to have more contact with the 'family' that I am actually frightened of. I don't really know what to do. I feel so trapped. Ideally I would love a job...any job but I have been out of work so long. There is an organisation here called 'Employ-ability'. If you disclose your condition to them (i.e. why you are on disability) they pay the employer for taking you on but that is on the condition of your employer being told about your 'condition'. The other organisation is Specialist Sterne. The specialise in helping autistic adults find work. That works along the same principles. As I have been unemployed so long I feel these may be the only options but I am not wild about my employers being told that I have 'psychiatric' issues or autism. I don't know what to do and in the absence of that I do nothing and one isolated day goes by after another.

@JanCarol I have actually ordered some Lithium Orotate online. Unfortunately I have developed a sore goitre though and have to go for an ultrasound so I don't know if I will take it. My bloods were normal except my peridose antibodies were off the chart 600 hundred times the normal limit. I like Pellegrino and have it occasionally for a treat since I can't drink alcohol anymore.

Oaktree

September 17, 2022

Hi Oaktree, I have been trying to write you but words don't come easy these days. Here is something I wrote, but couldn't finish:

Dear Oaktree

Even though I am flattered you are most certainly exaggerating my cognitive abilities. But that made me think about why I blossomed at university just to wither later. I think it was the absence of depression. As you know depression is hard work. To me the university curriculum was a walk in the park compared to the despair of depression. When I was depressed in high school, rote learning felt like an unsummorable mountain. Example: To learn the German language is rote learning par excellence and I really struggled in highschool, and I never got the hang of it. I was lousy, and the only reason I didn't fail was because one of my few good teachers, and she saw right through me. As I mentioned in some earlier post, when it was time for graduate studies I went non-depressed to Berlin, and within six months I was on the inside of German language. There is a system in the German language (surprise), and I could see none of it in highschool.

You mentioned an IQ-test, and they are very good at measuring intelligence insofar as the people believing in them are most certainly not very intelligent. These tests are mostly developed in the beginning of the 20th century, a marvelous time where homosexuality was cured by aversion therapy, eugenics was in fashion and phrenology was state of the art criminology. Somehow IQ tests went under radar and made it to 21 century. Of course these tests measure something, for example nervousness and prior exposure to brain teasers. Next to my boat in the harbor is a wooden boat owned by a dyslectic blacksmith. I know he is dyslectic, because we have to fill out forms now and then and I help him. His dyslexia has reduced his spoken vocabulary somewhat because he doesn’t read much. When it comes to restoring boats he is a genius and I am a complete idiot. When he makes some restoration it is always robust and beautiful, when I make some restoration it is sometimes robust and always ugly. I still love it though. What he does is by any reasonable measure very intelligent, yet I doubt that any intelligence test would pick it up.

Depression or any other mental obstacle plays a crucial role in what we can and cannot accomplish in certain time periods of our lives. Dyslexia for my neighbor in the harbor, depression for me through much of adolescence and the same for you at university. By the way when I got the exceptional stupid idea write ph.d. I experienced exactly the same confusion of what and what not to read that you reported in your previous post. Everything was important and not important at the same time. My ability to make a decision and stick with it was gone.

I must admit I am where you were a couple of weeks ago: I am having doubts about my healing. I feel stuck in a moment I can’t get out of (there is some Irish pop culture for you, ha). Sometimes I am afraid that the plasticity of my CNS is not good enough to reach normality after all these years on drugs. I always feel so lethargic. Whatever I do I can't shake the feeling. I would give anything for a spark of energy. I used to have too much, now I have nothing: Just to shower or do some basic cleaning seems like a big task. I am probably in a nasty wave but it is so drawn out that I can't recognize it as a wave.

I will try to write some more, maybe tonight.

Take care.

September 19, 2022

Dear Oaktree

I have tried to find a recording of the ‘A diagnosis for everyone’-festival but the only thing I can find is a live event from yesterday. So I must rely on your report, which I am happy to do. So here is what I think about the banality of evil and why psychiatry can or cannot be reformed and what to do about it.

Although my depressive episode in relation to my ph.d. in many ways was a perfect storm, much of my misery stemmed from the fact that I could no longer believe in reform of the big systems that make up modern society. When I talk about big systems I am referring to the political system, the judicial system, the economic system, the healthcare system (psychiatry as a part of it), the scientific system, media and entertainment and to some extent art. I am a sociologist and political scientist by training, and there is no empirical evidence to support the idea that reform initiatives of these systems work. When reform initiatives are undertaken the big systems adapt with lightning speed, and that means maybe reform initiatives can accommodate change, but never change as intended. There is also no empirical evidence to support the idea that the political system has control over the other systems. It is dangerous to think so, and the propagation of that idea causes much harm and malaise. If anything it is the other systems that have control over the political system.

Many are saying we are at a tipping point in our understanding of psychotropics and mental illness and the way we will treat mental illness in the future. I do not see it. There have always been vocal critics of psychiatry, the asylum and the definition of mental illness, not least in sociology (I won’t list all the usual suspects). Nobody talks about Erving Goffman these days even though he arguably made the most astute observation of mental institutions and mental illness. It was Goffman who in great detail described the new ‘medical model’ of mental illness: The idea that we can fix a broken soul in the same way we fix a broken leg or a mechanical watch for that matter. And the idea that it was the individual and not the circumstances, which needed treatment. A lot of the critical psychiatry scene takes great inspiration from Goffman (James Davies, Moncrieff etc), but most of the time they don’t know it.

Arendts New Yorker-reporting from the Eichmann trial is great journalism. And ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ is a good book. Under normal circumstances I do not like to explain current social phenomenon by Nazi Germany comparisons, and these comparisons always makes me suspicious. I used to have a friend and whenever he made an observation of current society, you could be certain he would find some 1933-1945 episode or phenomena where he saw a striking structural resemblance. I propose a fifty year ban on Third Reich analogies.

And yet Ahrendts observations regarding Eichmann's motivation and his personality is interesting (and since Eichmann was captured in the beginning 60s, one could argue he is an exception from ban on Third Reich analogies). As far as I remember, Ahrendts explanation for the banality part of ‘the Banality of Evil’ was Eichmann's rather mediocre intellect: Eichman couldn’t think for himself, and hence to create and uphold an identity he needed to belong. He wasn’t mentally ill (a psychopath, narcissist or whatever), and there was no deep philosophical justification for his actions. He just needed to belong so he could tell himself and others who he was.

And then we are back to the embeddedness. Here is the positive takeaway from Ahrendt to you, me and all the other un-embedded people out there: Maybe, just maybe, our non-embeddedness is a sign of our capacity for independent thinking. It certainly sends shivers down my spine when I agree to something just to confirm my inclusion in some social group.

I would not dismiss Ahrendts explanation for Eichmann's actions, but social psychology has come a long way since the publication of Eichman in Israel. And I think there are more nuanced and maybe also better explanations for the collective quasi-evil behavior which so blatantly is on display in modern psychiatry. But that is for another post.

I would point to another barrier which makes reform of psychiatry impossible, and it is information theoretical in nature. What I think most people in the critical psychiatry debate ignore is the complexity and extent of mental health problems in modern society on the one hand and the limited capacity of the psychiatric system on the other hand. If modern psychiatry should take individual biographic information into consideration when treating a patient it would be information overloaded within hours: Is the patient’s recollection of his own past correct, which events in patients life has significance and which do not, could trauma unrecognized by the patient have significance? Could any somatic conditions explain the patients suffering? Could the patient's socio-economic situation explain something? Has the patient been taking street drugs, and if so when and for how long? What prescribed drugs currently or in the past could play a part in the patient's current state? Is there any family history of abuse (violence, alcohol, drugs), or mental abnormalities (undiagnosed narcissism, psychopathy and the like)? Maybe it is some combination and permutation of the above, but which? How can we collect all this information in a reliable fashion? I could go on and and on. There is no freaking way a correct link between cause and effect could be established and an effective non-pharmacological treatment could be initiated (even in a psychiatric unit with an abundance for ressources and a highly educated and well trained staff), and hence modern psychiatry mostly treat you as individual without a formative prior life. They treat a thin ‘now slice’ of you and ignore the rest.

Therefore our current and future psychiatric system will keep on differentiate between who is mentally ill and who is not, and those deemed to be mentally ill are and will be treated according to some predefined schemata, and this schemata is currently the DSM-V in the US and ICD-11 in the rest of world. When the system can’t cope with the onslaught of patients it simply adjusts what is deemed to be a treatment-required illness. Currently in Denmark, if you are not hallucinating, not suicidal and not morbidly anoretic the public in-patient psychiatry more or less refuses to treat you. Of course, if a deep depression is allowed to get deeper at some point the patient will become psychotic or suicidal and at that point access to the system is granted. But the only treatment available is still schemata treatment (locate symptoms in ICD -> make recommended pharmacological intervention -> discharge patient when patient is treatment compliant and has internalized diagnosis). As a general rule the domain of psychiatric treatment is expanded if the patient can be treated as an out-patient in short cost effective consultations, and the domain of psychiatric treatment is restricted if you have to treat patients as costy in-patients. This strategy doesn’t work though: The cost effective pharmacological out-patient treatment most often fails, and our in-patient facilities are filled to the brim with once out-patient-treated but now very ill in-patients.

And hence psychiatry will keep drugging and labeling what in a certain culture at a certain time is viewed as mentally abnormal. At the moment it is behavior -/+ one standard deviation from the mean (more or less) which causes harmful distress for the individual, the individual’s immediate family or society. The crime of the century is of course to give people the impression that the psychiatric system can do anything else. It can not. It can drug people into passive disability, and that is it.

But what are we to do, Oaktree? You, me, the other SA members and all the rest of the poor souls out there? Psychiatry and psychotropics are currently dangerous and unsafe solutions and to believe in a reform of the system is not viable, at least for me.

Let me use myself as an example so I can pretend not to profess. I am almost certain that a great deal of my malaise grows out of my media use. I spend way too much time on youtube, news sites, wikipedia, pubmed, twitter (I do not use FB, but it is not because of discipline, but because of a stronger wish to isolate myself from my life before I got ill - nothing heroic about it). I am just quick-fix-stimulated. Instead of biking to the library, I read the wikipedia-article. Instead of attending a lecture, I watch a youtube video. Instead of going to the cinema, I netflix. Once I went to the theater regularly, now I haven’t been for ten years (not completely true, but almost). Instead of reading a book about the neurobiology of the brain I read pubmed abstracts. When I acquire new knowledge it is always from some corner of the internet.

And there is no doubt I seek out the most thrilling, entertaining, dopamine releasing bits of internet information, but always in the disguise of something serious and informative. But honestly, most of the time it is just spray painted junk.

But the biggest sin of all is I don’t read fiction anymore. I try, but the internet sucks me back in, much like television used to do (but in a much less effective way). To a certain degree the internet has also taken my ability to concentrate or let myself be immersed in the universe of a novel.

Why do I think literature is so important? It is the main source to understand that the human condition is a lonely affair, and understanding that makes us a little less lonely (oh yes, it is a paradox). Literature gives us a window to the human condition that no other art form or media offers. In everyday life we play our role (Goffman), and only superficially does it bear any resemblance with our inner life. For us, who live our life without a partner, or for those who live their life with a partner where no real deep connection exists, literature is especially important (I hate writing this paragraph because there are so many others who have written about this with far more eloquence).

And yet I don’t use literature currently. The internet and modern mass media is too slick, too effective and I can’t resist it. And there I consume pictures and words of happy people and of sad people and of angry people but almost never people living in a complex world with complex feelings of doubt, grief, joy and sadness.

To write and answer you is one of few truly healthy things I do at the moment. It is an opportunity to concentrate and put thoughts into words. A little like an old fashioned pen pal you have never met and never are going to meet. I like that.

Take care Oaktree

September 21, 2022

On 9/19/2022 at 8:43 AM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

To write and answer you is one of few truly healthy things I do at the moment. It is an opportunity to concentrate and put thoughts into words

Hi Mirtazapine20mg

I really enjoyed your replies and read them a few times. I tried to write a few replies on Word but my brain is not working that well at the moment and I am having trouble formulating what I want to say. Just to write that I enjoyed your replies and am grateful for them.

I hope to reply soon. I am glad that at least you have a job that you enjoy - repairing the old boat.

Oaktree

September 22, 2022

Take your time Oaktree. Life is slow here, so just write whenever the mood is right: a day, a week, a month :-).

October 3, 2022

Hey Oaktree - just stopping by to say hello.

The comments on your thread - this is a real conversation, not just platitudes. I love the way you stimulate people to explore their own environment and thinking - this is the kind of conversation that heals and helps!

On 9/2/2022 at 9:48 PM, Oaktree1 said:

How do you say to someone who asks what you are up to whose income is well over 250,000 grand a year? ' I am living on a

disability payment'.

Oh I hear you here! One of my least favourite questions is, "How are you? What have you been doing?" When everyone else seems so high-powered, and I am slogging through a day, trying to get a few things done. How do you answer that? "Well, I got out of bed today." "Well, the sun is shining today." "Well, I haven't felt great in a long time...."

On 9/2/2022 at 9:48 PM, Oaktree1 said:

In our society particularly in 'middle class' society - there are entrance codes to get in and to stay there as far as I can see. They are career and marital success and when I say success I mean making money and marrying money. If you fail to keep up - you're out. You're in no-mans-land. Everyone is too embarrassed to talk to you. 'There but for the grace of God go I and all that'. You are still geographically present but people move around you as though you're not there.

Well, I don't know if this helps or not. But I've been reading a sympathetic MD's Substack, called "A Midwestern Doctor." In it, he describes how these medical abuses used to be for select groups. The blacks in the horrible Tuskegee "experiment," the Jews in WW2, the gypsies, the gays, the marginalised. It wasn't until recently that he feels these abuses are now for everyone on the planet, regardless. We are all cattle.

And if you follow the economy at all, the "middle class" you speak of is on the verge of being smashed. It's being smashed in the USA, and in so many other countries where it becomes hard to find shelter, make enough income to get by, buy food, run a car (essential in the US, and fairly essential in Aus). It shrinks and diminishes as global pressure is put on to make us all bow before the global gods.

So if it gives you a bit of schadenfreude to think that it's not always going to be so - this dominance & arrogance is about to be smashed - then so be it.

On 9/2/2022 at 9:48 PM, Oaktree1 said:

Otherwise as can be seen above, my mood is very low - I feel hopeless and frightened about my future and lonely but I can't differentiate what is a neuro emotion and what is related to my own mental state and my own life circumstances.

I'm sure this is hard to look at. In my experience neuro-emotion is based on a rice grain of truth, amplified by the chemicals. It's actually an opportunity to look at that grain of rice under an electron microscope, because in neuro-emotion, it seems huge and overwhelming. But in your circumstances, you may be weary of looking at it.

On 9/4/2022 at 6:00 PM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

As you might know, giving lithium to people is originally a Danish idea.

It was actually discovered as "useful" in Australia, though Denmark may have been one of the first to uptake the idea.

On 9/17/2022 at 6:09 AM, Oaktree1 said:

Today he and his interlocutor Indigo Daya, another activist with lived experience who had worked in the system for years both appeared to convey that they regretted all the years they had spent trying to reform the system, that their work and their evidence had been co-opted into the toxic whole without any real change such that both have now disengaged.

Hubby and I watched a Romanian movie, called "Collective," which was about a night club fire, hundreds of injured, and the failure of the health system to treat. Many died of their injuries, they only had one burn ward, and it was overflowing, patients in critical condition shared rooms with other patients in critical condition - infections spread, even worms were found in their wounds which were not properly tended. Supposedly, the right thing to do, would have been to send these patients out of Romania to be treated in Austria and Germany. Other corruptions were discovered - a politician basically defrauded the system of tens of millions of Euros so that he could build an exclusive medical clinic in Switzerland. Other purchases of substandard disinfectants at inflated prices. One of the problems was that the "hospital manager" positions were political appointments - not because of administrative or medical skill.

Anyhow, that was the corruption. We were excited to watch the film because the synopsis said they changed politics, they changed history, they changed the way things were done in Romania. But they didn't. At the end of the movie, there was an election, and the party that got in immediately started appointing hospital managers out of favouritism. Someone who was not fit to run a single hospital was given a portfolio of 20.

So - you can protest, you can raise awareness, you can expose the deceits and lies - but the system has a way of looking after itself. Even in the face of all this corruption, they elected the party that did it - and the corruption continued unhindered.

Sigh.

On 9/19/2022 at 5:43 PM, Mirtazapine20mg said:

To a certain degree the internet has also taken my ability to concentrate or let myself be immersed in the universe of a novel.

Hey Mirt - there were a number of books in the early 00's about the "Attention Economy," how what is valuable now isn't even the data or the algorithms - but the attention. The more you can be "pinged" and distracted, the more successful they are at capturing your attention. I confess, I struggle, too - it's much easier to read something on the internet than to work on my art table, or write something original - it's all there, clamouring for my attention!

Knowing about the Attention Economy gives me a little edge, I guess - but how many humans right now do not know that their brain and attention are effectively being dissected and used for profit?

Anyhow, I just stopped by to catch up and see how you're going - I hope you see the Sun today!

JC

October 3, 2022

4 hours ago, JanCarol said:

Hey Mirt - there were a number of books in the early 00's about the "Attention Economy," how what is valuable now isn't even the data or the algorithms - but the attention. The more you can be "pinged" and distracted, the more successful they are at capturing your attention. I confess, I struggle, too - it's much easier to read something on the internet than to work on my art table, or write something original - it's all there, clamouring for my attention!

Hi @JanCarol and thank you for an uplifting post. I think the attention grabbing properties of mass media have always been there, but earlier they were more benign. You knew that television was fast calories but with little self discipline you could avoid most of the tentacles of stupefying entertainment. The logarithmically personalized internet is a whole other ballgame. But I think you are absolutely right: There is an edge to knowing how these media work.

Niell Postman published a lovely book in 1985, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. Maybe you know it. I think it is by far the best book written on the psychological and social consequences of living in a mass mediated society. Postman analyzes television, but multiply with a factor of ten and you have a description of current society. Besides being an important book, it is also beautifully written. I have read quite a few of your posts @JanCarol, and I know you will appreciate that.

I was close to suggesting to @Oaktree1 that we should establish the world's first PAWS-only transnational book club. Between the disgusting quick fixes of Big Pharma and the multitude of commercialized self help solutions, I think bibliotherapy is one of few truly wonderful and healthy ideas out there. And it is cheap and impossible to monetize. Read good books and be reminded that your hell is not yours alone. There is both something cathartic and liberating about that.

4 hours ago, JanCarol said:

And if you follow the economy at all, the "middle class" you speak of is on the verge of being smashed. It's being smashed in the USA, and in so many other countries where it becomes hard to find shelter, make enough income to get by, buy food, run a car (essential in the US, and fairly essential in Aus). It shrinks and diminishes as global pressure is put on to make us all bow before the global gods.

So if it gives you a bit of schadenfreude to think that it's not always going to be so - this dominance & arrogance is about to be smashed - then so be it.

This I like, and agree 100% with you. And it gets even better. My personal experience is that living outside the perimeter of the middle class is not a bad life once you get used to it. The problematic part is crossing the border. So let us lean back and observe the spectacle. They are about to embark on a journey we completed long ago. If they ask, I will happily teach them how to make a delicious potato soup for a dollar or less. And should they get a panic attack on their first ride on public transportation, I will hold their hand too.

Regarding lithium I suggest a compromise. Carl and Frederik Lange (danes) used lithium in the treatment of mood disorders from the 1850s and onwards, but it was certainly in Australia (John Cade) the foundational experiments for the modern use of lithium was carried out. Another dane, Mogens Schou, knew about Langes use of lithium, but didn’t think much of it until he read about Cade’s results from Australia and was fascinated. Schou carried out the first clinical trials with lithium, and thereafter lithium was approved the world over as a treatment for mood disorders. So both Australia and Denmark were instrumental in the use of a cheap, natural and non-patentable salt in the treatment of people with severe mood disorders. I like this interpretation, and it is true.

I will at once watch "Collective".

October 3, 2022

Btw @JanCarol, Mogens Schou and John Cade received the Kittay International Award in 1974 together :-). That is nice too.

October 4, 2022

Hey Oaktree!

(guess I'm kinda writing to Mirt here - I hope you are okay? Thinking of you!)

15 hours ago, Mirtazapine20mg said:

. You knew that television was fast calories but with little self discipline you could avoid most of the tentacles of stupefying entertainment. The logarithmically personalized internet is a whole other ballgame.

It's been proven that you get a little dopamine hit every time you get a notification. When you know what I know about brain chemistry - and addiction - this hit becomes a rut, and you run to that little hit every chance you get. Children who have been raised with this tech are not in control of their own brains, because they haven't learned to regulate before they've been given this little dopamine device.

This, to me, is positively sinister, and obvious when you go out to a restaurant and see people around the table - no eye contact, dived into their devices until the meal comes.

15 hours ago, Mirtazapine20mg said:

Niell Postman published a lovely book in 1985, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. Maybe you know it. I think it is by far the best book written on the psychological and social consequences of living in a mass mediated society. Postman analyzes television, but multiply with a factor of ten and you have a description of current society. Besides being an important book, it is also beautifully written. I have read quite a few of your posts @JanCarol, and I know you will appreciate that.

I have ordered it for my kindle. I started this inquiry around that time. Marshall MacLuhan's excellent "The Medium is the Massage" and there's another book / video series by a hypnotherapist, d*ck Sutphen (RIP) called 'Battle for your Mind" which is harder to find - but these both alerted me to the simplicity of the timing of video. How many seconds before screen change? What flashing lights or sounds keep you in a passive, alpha state of consciousness? But these are focusing only on video. With devices - the response is much faster, and the entrainment and captivation is channeled much more deeply into neurotransmitters and pathways of the brain.

Thank you for the writing compliment - that's why I'm here. It seems that Oaktree's erudite writing style (I call her an old fashioned "lady of letters") attracts others who like to use words to best effect. Additionally, this type of writing is healing. We learn from each other, we support each other. The people who can clarify their thinking through writing, expression, speaking - these are the people who get better.

A long term study was done on nuns & dementia. It was an observational study, but because it was nuns, there were a number of controls. Same diet, same routine, same practices. What they found was that nuns who could express themselves in words with clarity held onto their marbles a lot longer than those who had no education, or who could not express themselves clearly.

So these conversations are important - to you, to Oaktree, to me, too!

15 hours ago, Mirtazapine20mg said:

I was close to suggesting to @Oaktree1 that we should establish the world's first PAWS-only transnational book club. Between the disgusting quick fixes of Big Pharma and the multitude of commercialized self help solutions, I think bibliotherapy is one of few truly wonderful and healthy ideas out there. And it is cheap and impossible to monetize. Read good books and be reminded that your hell is not yours alone. There is both something cathartic and liberating about that.

This is a brilliant idea! One of the reasons I enjoy talking with Oaktree (talking about her in front of her back!) is she is so well read and literary! Not like I have time to add books to my reading list - but - it's always a delight to read about books, even when I cannot read them all! (I have something like 6 books on the dining table, with about 80 books behind it that I've started and mean to finish!)

Thanks for the detailed information about lithium. I'll respond on my thread - I reckon, Oaktree, if you are battling a goitre you should not take this stuff at all!

I hope you see the sun today!

October 4, 2022

Whups, hit "send" and there was one more good part from Mirt

15 hours ago, Mirtazapine20mg said:

My personal experience is that living outside the perimeter of the middle class is not a bad life once you get used to it. The problematic part is crossing the border.

Hubby and I watched a delightful Indian film last night, called "The Crow's Egg" (or "Kaakkaa Muttai" in Tamil). It's about "slum boys" who want to taste a pizza. But there is a border - only rich people can go into the pizza restaurant. Only rich people have 300 rupees to buy a pizza. So the slum boys work really hard to earn the money to buy a pizza. They call for delivery, but their address is the "slums by the church" and so the pizza place hangs up the phone. They even earn more money to buy clothes so that they can go into the restaurant.

It's a border, a boundary. "You people are not welcome here."

This didn't affect me much, I've been middle class (never rich), I've been poor & hungry & worried about how to get enough petrol to get to work, or what can I eat for $2? Now that I'm back in the (lower) middle class - I found it useful to "hide in the crowd." To look like others, to not stick out, to hide in the crowd. I didn't need admission to that exclusive restaurant or night club anyway - I'd likely hate it!

But over the last 2 years, our society changed a lot, and with digital control of humanity, I found it impossible to hide in the crowd. My medical status makes me stand out like a sore thumb - and I'm not sure how much you were aware of what was being done here in Australia in the name of Captain Trips, but I would not do well in an internment camp. The laws changed overnight, and all of a sudden, I was marked, separate from the crowd, because I would not take an untested drug.

It is like A Midwestern Doctor was saying - the torture and medical experiments which were originally for the outcast, the marginalised - is now being applied to the whole of humanity. And maybe you're okay on this flavour of the month - but next month's flavour they might get you.

Quote

And Then They Came for Me (First They Came Poem)

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

By, Reverend Martin Niemoller

So yes. I expect the borders between haves & have-nots to be walled & gated very heavily in the future.

I've even noticed this on the internet. There is an internet for the rich, and an internet for the rest of us. For example, it used to be that if I was thinking of someone from my past, I could google their name and find them. Their address, phone, email. Now this has been contracted out, and this information is behind a paywall (with several companies clamouring for my dollar to get that information!). White pages on the internet doesn't really exist now. That's just one example of the walls that have gone up across the internet (then there's doxxing, banning, cancelling - another border that people get caught in. Watch what you say! Big Brother is indeed watching, it's just not how Orwell thought - more of a Chinese system where everybody watches everybody and reports the outliers!) There are other things, too - the running of the computer has become so much more complex - I used to fix these things myself, but it's now so far beyond my comprehension that I tolerate bugs & problems until that fatal collapse when I have to hire a specialist to come look at it. An internet for the rich, and an internet for everyone else.

So - I have probably "invaded some borders" with this post - but there are many of us - who were estranged from "society" before - who are further estranged with the threat of being locked out digitally at any time depending on the whim of the Powers That Be.

Sorry Oaktree for invading your thread - but I believe this is an important conversation.

Sun, today?
Jan

October 4, 2022

Hi Mirtazapine20mg and JanCarol,

Dont' feel much up to posting at present but I wrote a response a few weeks ago to Mirt's replies to me which I'll post now. I was fiddling around with it to try to get it up to Mirt's intellectual level and then just left it. Thanks both of you for contacting me. The replies are really interesting - I'll re read both. Below is reply to Mirt from a few weeks ago:-

I think it is interesting that you were not depressed in Berlin. What was it about Berlin I wonder if we are to believe that much of ‘depression’ is sociologically based? I wonder why you came back to Denmark. I lived in Spain and France – I managed there, was not as bad as I became when I came back to my own country and I lived in England. I loved England. But they say – wherever you go there you are. Perhaps if I had stayed there longer my old personality would have reasserted itself. I have dreams of living in North Essex – seeing the North Sea; the light there is extraordinary and it is full of medieval churches and still quite deserted although wealthy Londoners are beginning to buy there since the pandemic. That is my fantasy place. But in reality I like hills and mountains a lot and Essex is pretty flat so I’d probably get alienated there eventually.

But it’s interesting that the depression you had in high school that you say affected your school work melted away when you were in Berlin. That’s another place I liked and lots of people where I am from are living there now. Better quality of life; cheaper decent housing; jobs and a wonderful cultural life.

We call it secondary school here. I was quite good at rote learning when I was younger, had a good memory. The fact that you could see ‘the system’ in the German language and mastered it in six months – well that’s bright I think. Before the lockdown came in 2020, I was doing a night course in German. It was my third attempt to learn it – always loved the sound of it. That came to a crashing halt anyway in March 2020 with the first lockdown so I think I am fated not to learn it.

Speaking of IQ tests and their design, I did one in order to take German instead of French as a second subject with my primary degree but… haha failed the IQ test and had to do French instead. German was not offered in my school at all. It is interesting to hear that IQ tests were designed around the same time as Eugenics came on stream.

It’s interesting to hear about the dyslectic boatman – your description of him is very lyrical. There is nothing lyrical about describing someone using ‘tech’. People look hunted or hypnotised when they’re staring down at their devices tapping and swishing their fingers. And on that point – i.e. your shortened attention span – well you’re probably already aware that the news is in. Smart devices have destroyed our attention spans.

A book came out about it in the last few years by Johanne Hari called ‘ Stolen Focus’. I read quite a bit of it but could not finish it…could not concentrate long enough… haha.

I would recommend the book though. He interviews quite a few people who made it big in the tech industry, including the guy (it’s generally a guy) who designed the endless scroll (you know the way you don’t have the press an arrow anymore to get to the next page the way it was in the dark ages 15 years or so ago). He apparently now deeply regrets his whole creation. Tech bigwigs don’t like their kids having devices at all. They know well what they do to the brain.

It’s awful that you are not able to read fiction anymore. I am in the same boat unfortunately. It happened somewhere in the middle of tapering Cymbalta. I can just about read a factual book – in that I can dip in and out of it, a page here, a chapter there…but fiction – forget it.

I remember a writer and journalist I liked very much now dead - Nuala O Faoileain. She thought very much as you do about literature. She had lectured in English literature and had been a scholarship student. She read deeply all her life – all of Proust. I cannot imagine doing that. She wrote in her autobiography – ‘Are You Somebody?’ that when you can read you are never alone. “And there I consume pictures and words of happy people and of sad people and of angry people but almost never people living in a complex world with complex feelings of doubt, grief, joy and sadness.” You articulate so well how simplistic communication has become.

“ In everyday life we play our role (Goffman), and only superficially does it bear any resemblance with our inner life. “ I heard a playwright interviewed last weekend - Eugene O Brien - who said pretty much the same thing. I think most people have to live like that. One of the good things about not being embedded is that I don’t have to do that. I suppose as you explain so well, a good book shows us a character’s inner life so that we can see that they feel similar feelings to us so that there is a commonality among us I suppose. I confess that I don’t find that much in books now and that is also why I stopped reading. There are too few oddities like myself out there and the average woman’s book… well I can’t relate to any of the characters. I’m not married, in a job, don’t have a group of female friends or children and live without intimacy so there’s little for me to relate to in fiction written by most women. I tend to relate to male characters instead – I used to like books about outsiders – Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume’, John Banville’s ‘The Book of Evidence and ‘Engleby’ by Sebastian Faulk but I haven’t read a ‘good’ book in years now.

My favourite author is Stephen King and always will be and I don’t care that that marks me as under brow – I am. His imaginative reach is boundless for me and I think he is a genius. He can find the horror and the wrong in the everyday – I’ve always loved horror the most – it’s so comforting. What I love about King is that there is redemption in most of his stories – the monster is vanquished and that makes me feel secure. That is why I don’t read or re-read the ones with the really bad endings – ‘Pet Cemetery’ when a beloved cat turns into a demon after being brought back to life – that I could never bring myself to read. So in that way I suppose they are adult fairy tales. It’s funny that he is somehow prophetic even at his most outlandish. ‘Cell’ a book he wrote in the 90’s about a virus that spreads through mobile phones which turns people into murderous zombies seems strangely prescient now.

“I must admit I am where you were a couple of weeks ago: I am having doubts about my healing. I feel stuck in a moment I can’t get out of (there is some Irish pop culture for you, ha). Sometimes I am afraid that the plasticity of my CNS is not good enough to reach normality after all these years on drugs. I always feel so lethargic. Whatever I do I can't shake the feeling. I would give anything for a spark of energy. I used to have too much, now I have nothing: Just to shower or do some basic cleaning seems like a big task. I am probably in a nasty wave but it is so drawn out that I can't recognize it as a wave.”

I am sorry to hear that. I am having doubts too about whether I will ever feel ok again. I can remember how I felt in my late 20s and 30’s when I was off drugs – full of energy, well rested, engaged with life, able to eat and drink whatever I wanted, able to do whatever form of exercise I wanted to do pain free. I can empathise with basic tasks seeming insurmountable.

Unlike yourself, two weeks ago I was highly anxious and despairing. My mind was running like a CPU that has overheated and I would often forget what time of day it was and was unable to plan. Hours would go by and I will suddenly feel ravenous but was too hungry to prepare a meal so I ate popcorn or peanut butter. Then last week that intense anxiety settled a bit and I was able to sleep properly again.

I try to stay in the moment when completing household tasks but given that household tasks are the mainstay of my life at the moment they seem to stretch out interminably while my mind time spins round with one worried thought after another. It’s a truism but I’ll write it anyway - housework is boring and repetitive. It’s not rewarding or I don’t find it so. It’s not surprising that so many women relied on mother’s little helpers to get through their day. I think it’s one of the reasons why Queen Elizabeth lived to 96 – she only had to do housework if she wanted to do it. I did read ‘Self Help for your Nerves’ written by an author highly recommend on this site – Dr Claire Weekes – a no nonsense Australian psychiatrist. She specifically refers to housework making rumination much worse. The copy I have was published in the 1970s. She said it was much tougher to treat middle aged women as most of them were at home doing housework and did not have the comfort of work which tends to stop rumination and give the brain rest.

Vis a vis your penpal analogy, it is sad that those who end up living impoverished, restricted and lonely lives largely as a result of the psychiatric system and those who still manage to live fulllish lives but suffer with iatrogenic harm from psychiatric drugs are reduced to writing on a discussion board for community and support and that most will never meet. If the internet had never existed I suppose perhaps that community would never have been possible and an alternative narrative to the mainstream one presented so that is the silver lining.

I am thankful that this board was created by Altostrata and still exists thanks to the work of her and her mods. I sometimes think that when we are long gone some archaeologist will discover it and publish what people had to endure in our time. Every word that is written on this board is documentary evidence of iatrogenic harm by the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry which is sanctioned by almost the entirety of our society.

I had never heard of Erving Goffman. I don’t know much about sociology although I have seen some interviews via the Medicating Normal Youtube channel with the sociologist Prof David Cohen of UCLA which made eminent sense. And having had a quick look at Erving Goffman on Wiki (well it is there and I’m on a computer ((even using the word computer seems outdated now)), quite a lot of James Davie’s presentation on the AD4E located the origins of the patient’s distress in sociological reasons. I have heard quite a few of his presentations and he didn’t refer to Goffman although I suppose he is speaking to the layperson and he didn’t refer to him in the first book I read of his – ‘Cracked’. His particular treatise is that neoliberalism is directly responsible for the explosion of ‘psychiatric illnesses and widespread drugging we have seen in the last 40 or so years but you probably know that already.

Thanks for the interesting précis on systems and there being no evidence that reform initiatives of large organisational structures works. I can understand in a small way how that made you miserable.

I do think that as modes of thinking and behaviour change that they can change structures in some cases. For example in the judicial system, rape within marriage was legal in the UK and the country I live in until 1992. The idea that conjugal rights did not need consent came from the common law and when social attitudes changed enough, the law was changed. In response to protests in this country from victims of sexual crime in particular, more emphasis is being placed on victim impact statements and the ridiculous practice of a defendant having unlimited character witnesses presented to the jury after the case is heard without being subject to cross examination is now under review and will probably be changed. This is largely in response to years of public protest by victims of these crimes and thanks to organisations that exist to help victims of crime in this country being vocal about victims needing more rights. The law is I suppose a particularly archaic system (in common law countries) and that is slowly being reformed.

In the case of people like us – we need more of us and we need to be able to drop the anonymity and that is next to impossible if you rely on the government for money because of 'psychiatric' disability. The people who can and should be speaking out are those in a 'secure' position in society who have been damaged by these drugs - those who are not in danger of becoming homeless or hungry or cold and who have a job that won't be threatened if they speak out. I don't know if there is that many of them. Most of us just don't have that level of security.

Anyhow I count what I write on this board as bearing witness. Was I helped by the drugs and the psychiatric system? No - my problems were made much, much worse and most of what should have been the best years of my life were lived while struggling under that system or running scared away from that system. Did it help me? No, not in any real way and when I write about the system - I include in that not just the psychiatrists and their drugs but all their attendants, the clinical psychologists and the nursing staff kind though most of the nurses were. I also include the so called psychotherapists I attended, the ones who declared themselves hostile to the 'bio medical model' who turned out to be as ego driven, inept and destructive as most of the psychiatrists I met. The whole enterprise is a cesspit which traumatized or merely unhappy people are thrown or walk into unawares alike.

Anyways end of rant - no point crying over spilt milk and what's done cannot be undone etc etc.

Oaktree

October 4, 2022

2 hours ago, Oaktree1 said:

A book came out about it in the last few years by Johanne Hari called ‘ Stolen Focus’. I read quite a bit of it but could not finish it…could not concentrate long enough… haha.

LOL. I love it Oaktree.

October 4, 2022

2 hours ago, Oaktree1 said:

Patrick Suskind’s ‘Perfume’

Me too, gosh I had totally forgotten 'Perfume'.

2 hours ago, Oaktree1 said:

I think it’s one of the reasons why Queen Elizabeth lived to 96 – she only had to do housework if she wanted to do it.

I am laughing here.

Thank you @Oaktree1 for a wonderful post. I will re-read it because there are so many interesting observations. I can already promise you one thing: I have never read Stephen King, but I will now. And I will write you back on my experience with King. I don't care if I have trouble reading fiction: I will force myself. Where do I begin?

Before I go, a few quick comments:

2 hours ago, Oaktree1 said:

In the case of people like us – we need more of us and we need to be able to drop the anonymity and that is next to impossible if you rely on the government for money because of 'psychiatric' disability.

This is so important.

2 hours ago, Oaktree1 said:

I’m not married, in a job, don’t have a group of female friends or children and live without intimacy so there’s little for me to relate to in fiction written by most women.

Well, so am I.

There is a paradox here (we love paradoxes): I moan about not being able to concentrate and yet I read every word from you with a ferocious appetite. On SA I every now and then see members encourage somebody else to write a book about their experiences. I won't do that with you, because I am afraid it will come across as a dishonest attempt to cheer you up in the midst of misery. So I will leave at “my problems with concentration disappears when I read your posts”.

So many of my heros suffered @oaktree. Were lonely and miserable in a phase of their life. One thing I know about Stephen King is that he was completely gone on alcohol and cocaine at one point. You do not treat yourself that way if everything is swell and dandy. Hell, ¼ of every woman in Denmark above the age of 45 are on antidepressants. So maybe many of them have a family and a partner, but they are still miserable. If you were to meet me at a social gathering you would have no clue about the miserable side of my existence. We are not that alone.

My comment about Moncrieff and Davies was wrong. I am a big fan of both and actually do not care if they take inspiration from Goffman without knowing. I was regretting that Goffman plays no role in the psychiatry debate because it is next level ****. When I read his description of patients conforming to the role of “the good patient” just to survive in a mental institution I think: “Ohh, he got me.” And I feel a sigh of relief and I forgive myself.

I will write more Oaktree. But I have to clean my apartment, because a technician is coming tomorrow to check my heat pump. I wish he didn't.

Oaktree1: tapering from Remeron while dealing with Cymbalta withdrawal

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