Living with Schizophrenia: Coffee and Friends | Hacker News Reader

Living with Schizophrenia: Coffee and Friends

well.blogs.nytimes.com

87 pointsbasisword9 comments

I sure appreciate people who are willing to write openly about personal experiences with mental illness. It's difficult to deal with, but many times it seems the hardest part of finding an effective treatment for individuals is getting past the stigma.

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

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

I absolutely agree with this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Society and culture demonizes the mentally ill.

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

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

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

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

Since you are on disability anyways, can't you just start doing some freelance type work up until you're making enough to drop disability?

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

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

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

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