Dual diagnosis, by which I mean psychosis, schizophrenia and personality disorders, etc., and the chemical meddling they face thereafter as the norm causes much harm and suppresses the natural recall of events so harmfull they were repressed to survive. These people need a tight hand to hold them and teach themselves to care for and know themselves. They do not need what I have seen of the current mental health system.
That they often turn to alcohol, drugs, sex, violence, and hence prostitution or end up in prison - and invariably cost the taxpayer thousands is a result of a lack of recognition of what we are really dealing with. The powerful in the sytem must recognise this fact and start dealing with it. The human cost doesn’t seem to bother anyone. But it is huge. Lives ruined.
The researched and accepted stats say it all 20 - 40% of adult population were abused sexually as children <16 and up to 95% of the drug addled, prostitutes, prisoners and mental health patients in some studies are abuse victims.*
All the rest: the psychosis, drugs and meaningless lives is the result. This means that most of the effort and energy of the system is misguided into reducing, controlling or medicating away symptomatic instincts to release tension.
* With traumatic memory and forgetting as such a core issue in this stats are very variable. self reporting is only accurate when the self that is reporting recalls the events. The key stats I quote come from the analysis by Charles L. Whitfield in “Memory and Abuse”.
Loading ...
64 Comments
Irreverant Buddhist - Laing [1967] found ‘in over 100 cases where we have studied the actual circumstances around the social event when one person comes to be regarded as schizophrenic it seems to us that WITHOUT EXCEPTION the experience and behaviour that gets labelled schizophrenic is……a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation’.
[Politics of Experience, p95].
My own experience working first at the asylum and then the acute psychiatric ward in hospital led me to similar [and generally unpopular] conclusions - although I do not dispute that neuro-biological changes may result from certain environmental stressors, especially in early life.
By then anti-psychiatry had largely been discredited and this school of thought amounted to little more than a byword for Laings erratic personal behaviour and controversial clinical activities.
I have seen at first hand how much suffering arises due to ‘psychiatric symptoms’ but I still felt uncomfortable with many of the bio-medical assumptions underpinning care and treatment.
The Society for Laingian Studies
Ronald David Laing
accident and emergency charge nurse - I am not surprised at your reflections in practice - neither at the fact you reached them or their being unpopular - after all if we stop labelling mad people as mad we will have to actually face the insanity of our society. And this is a step we are not yet ready to make.
Chemically, Psychiatry is meddling in things it doesn’t understand - and at root this is another form of original sin - the “illness” must be in the patient not in our civilised society as a whole and must be inherent in the individual, something about them, and not in their reaction to experiences.
What a pile of crap. Psychosis is not a “natural” reaction to childhood trauma. There are many people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder without negative childhood experiences. There are many people who have had negative childhood trauma and not experienced psychosis. Psychosis is seen primarily within psychotic illnesses such as bipolar and schizophrenia so why not accept it as a facet of these organic, biological illnesses? Why is antipsychiatry so determined to bring the “blame” of the illness down to the patient and nothing else?
Once you start calling psychosis and schizophrenia ’sane’, you rob the word of all meaning. ‘Sane’ as in ‘mentally healthy’ should be defined in the same way as any other kind of health. A knee’s healthy if it bends without causing pain and enables the person whose knee it is to walk, run, jump, etc. Mental health, or ’sanity’ is a mind that works without causing pain and can respond in an adaptive way to the normal demands to which it is put.
Clearly the people you’re referring to can’t be described in that way. Maladaptive and self-damaging behaviours are clearly not ’sane’ responses to trauma.
Also, you do realise that quoting statistics that imply that a high percentage of the population have been abused actually negates your point, right? Because if that many people have been abused, then your claim that a high proportion of people in the mental health system have been abused would mean that a history of abuse was not a very significant predictor for mental illness.
I agree with secretlifofamanicdepressive on this one, I suffered no childhood problems, and was fine untill I was 19 then bang i was ill, it is no reflection on my family, just was unlucky. but hen again I know people who had awfull childhood and are fine, and some who are not, I think it is a bilogical thing more than anything.
Hi Irreverent Buddhist. Thanks for your post which seems to have stimulated some interesting respones. Sorry, I don’t know much about anti-psychiatry but as ever I’ll chuck in my tuppence worth… and I’ll try to avoid saying “what a pile of crap”… pmsl
If as you say up to 40% of children are sexually abused then surely the most common consequence of sexual abuse is to be normal?
Speaking as a nutter, whether or not I was abused as a child is of little consequence to me now in middle age. I survived childhood and was a healthy and mostly happy adult throughout my working life. I went mad (and yes, after having paranoid delusions I’m happy to be labelled mad) when I was nearer the grave than the cradle so I don’t find my childhood experiences are hugely relevant.
It’s a bit like treating someone with PTSD. Fair enough if they have returned from the Gulf War but if it is an 87 year old still traumatised by WW2 then maybe you should just help him make the most of what he’s got?
If I had been infected with HIV as a child and suddenly developed full blown AIDS in middle age, I’m pretty sure my priority would be to address my current symptoms and immediate needs rather than immerse myself in the initial cause of the infection. Fair enough it would be great for society to prevent further such infections, but for those of us in the here and now, maybe it’s just too late to bother about.
To add my bit. I have been in places, within the system, where to question Laing’s theories (and other alternative psychiatric viewpoints) is tantamount to blasphemy. Particularly had this problem with a few advocates and social workers. Defending even a portion of the medical model gets one labelled as a narrow minded biological reductionist.
I was intending a series of posts on this topic but the comments above seem to be making my intended points very well.
Maybe I will finally get round to my ‘All Scientologists Are Nutters’ post …
Indeed. 1% of the population are schizophrenic. 1% are manic depressive. So the other 38% aren’t. Hardly “causing” anything, there!
Mental Nurse, I’m well confused because your point is completely unclear and garbled, especially in your comments. You used some pretty offensive terms in your post (”these people” etc). What are you actually on about. What point are you making? Stop hiding behind Laing.
I have tried to formulate a response to this ridiculous propersition but have not been able to improve upon “What a pile of crap”.
If psychiatry spent less time inappropriately focussing on people who “turn to alcohol, drugs, sex, violence, and hence prostitution or end up in prison” there might be more resources available for people who have genuine health conditions such as bipolar and schizophrenia.
Like Mental I have worked with staff with extremely polarised ideas who viewed any reference to a medical model of care as pure evil. Many of these social workers and therapists saw the identified patient as a poor scapegoat for a dysfunctional family. Many of these patients were indeed from extremely dysfunctional families… as were quite a few of my colleagues. I saw neurotic old ladies totally obsessed with whether the tea would arrive on time and psychotic young men completely distracted by voices folks and unable to focus on little else. Despite this they were often encouraged to attend sessions of individual psychotherapy, group therapy and family therapy to which they were mostly oblivious.
Interestingly, these models of care were imposed on people already tranquilised/sedated by the dreadful “medical model” and always took place during office hours Monday-Friday. The talking therapy people were never there when the police van arrived at midnight and the cops fled the unit after uncuffing and leaving an enraged psychotic guy who was “gonna kill the lot of you”. Restraint and intramuscular injection are very often the best option here. I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying to calm the situation by saying “Hey hang on a minute buddy, were you buggered by your father?”
It would be interesting to leave the anti-psychiatry folks in sole charge of an admissions unit for a weekend.
thesecretlifeofamanicdepressive
In response to comment 10. Not my post. It is by the Irreverent Buddhist. To be fair he did post it at my request as I think he made some interesting points worth discussing. As the good number of comments has proved.
His point is there is a percentage of people in the system who are there not because they are ill, in a classical ‘my brain is a little bit wonky’ way, but because they have been seriously broken by life. A point I made in a post long ago. I am thinking of many of the people who end up with a diagnosis of personality disorder and possibly people who are addicted to drugs.
When discussing this post via email Irrev Buddhist did supply some background information which helped explain his or her feelings on the subject.
There seem to be two previous posts on a similar theme:
Horrible Lives Make People Mad
Home Is Where The Violence Is
Then the poster of this entry should have been more clear. Personality disorders are, by and large, caused by life events. Mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are in my opinion, biological. Which is why they are treated with first line medication and why personality disorders are treated first line with therapy.
btw welcome to the site experimentalchimp, love the name.
Etymologically the term psychiatry arose from the idea that the ‘psyche’ or ‘mind’ could be healed, but as Szasz has already pointed out, the mind is not an organ.
If schizophrenia, or indeed other mental illnesses are yet to be mapped ‘brain diseases’ then why do they not fall under the remit of the neurologist ?
General paralysis of the insane was believed to be a psychiatric disorder until it was recognised as tertiary neurosyphilis - it has since been taken over by non-psychiatric doctors [in the main].
Psychiatry is unique in that it treats conduct [in the absence of physical pathology], and against the wishes of the patient [in increasing numbers]. Over the last decade there has also been an unexplained steep rises in the use of psychotropics - and of course increased pharmacological treatment for children.
I am not anti-medication, or antipsychiatry for that matter, but I am not suprised that Irrevereant Buddhist and others are posing the sort of questions and observations contained in the original post.
a e charge nurse: Some interesting points there.
The mind may not be an organ, but neither is cancer and oncologists are still the people you want to see. Specialisms aren’t about what part of the body is involved, but what skill sets are most usefully employed to deal with specific problems, hence the growing number of specialities that deal with interactions between seemingly discrete systems.
It’s also inaccurate to claim that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses have not been mapped to neural correlates. None have been mapped completely (and indeed, the technology is nowhere near good enough to do so at this point), but there are demonstrable neurological and genetic features to many mental illnesses.
Taking an anti-psychiatric stance is just as dumb as taking a pro-psychiatric stance. Like everything else, psychiatry has its failings. Claiming that there are massive institutional failings in the mental health system is as blind a stance as claiming that everything the multinational pharmaceutical companies do is for the good of patients. Nevertheless, better drugs are a good thing and psychiatry does help people. The appropriate question isn’t “How can we stop these fools?”, but “How can we retain the good things that these institutions do while dispensing with the bad?” Hyperbole is not conducive to anything other than these pro forma arguments.
thesecretlife… wrote:
“What a pile of crap. Psychosis is not a “natural” reaction to childhood trauma. There are many people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder without negative childhood experiences.”
You seem not to have noticed or contemplated the words I finished my post with: “* With traumatic memory and forgetting as such a core issue in this stats are very variable. self reporting is only accurate when the self that is reporting recalls the events.”
How do you know those people with Schizophrenia and so called organic disease were not abused? You do not. The fact of the matter is quite simple: events so traumatic the oinfant/child brain can not cope with them and process them are pushed somewhere into the unconscious mind. Where and the exact processes of these are as yet undetermined though many theories abound. The schizophrenic may report a perfect childhood which simply did not exist but is the product of their imagination filling the gaps in the hell they experienced. It could just as easily be this disjunction between reality and percieved reality which creates their “schizophrenic” symptomology.
It is as valid a scientific theory to suggest that later in life their “schizophrenic” symptoms are natural arising due to this suppression as any other.
Generally I have found people who start something with “what a pile of crap” are about to launch into .. a pile of crap. In this case the rule seems to vbe working fine.
My “anti-psychiatric” stance is no less scientific than the psychiatric stance. In fact either stance, taken to the extreme, would be plain wrong and the false dividing line which creates this error does not even lay in psychiatry, psychology or mental health, it lays in philosophy: Descartes faulted dualism that places mind and body in seperate universes and leads to “mind” medicine and “body” mediciine”.
Someone show me a mind unnattached to a body or a body unnattached to a mind and I will believe Descartes dualism and that the whole mind/body divide in medicine is therefore rational. Of course, you can’t do that: Why? Because Descartes was logically wrong as is the mind/body divide in medicine.
Finally, Bipolarmo wrote “If as you say up to 40% of children are sexually abused then surely the most common consequence of sexual abuse is to be normal?”.
In response to this I will pose three questions which actually, if you contemplate their meaning fully, will enlighten anyone’s thought on this whole subject matter:
1) what is sanity?
2) what is madness?
3) who is the judge?
If you say sanity is behaving normally (the usual form of response) then it was mad of columbus to sail round the world and he should have been locked up rather than given control of a ship.
ps.
experimentalchimp wrote:
“Once you start calling psychosis and schizophrenia ’sane’, you rob the word of all meaning.”
The world has no meaning. The Human mind has a “storytelling facility” apparantly an evolutionary device to provide our conscious awareness with a frame of reference in which to place and recall events that may help in survival and reproduction. This facility is always looking for meaning where it does not exist - it is it’s role:
e.g. Thunder = “unhappy Gods”
Irreverent Buddhist: Why is it that the anti-psychiatry crowd so often come across as medicine’s equivalent of young earth creationists?
‘It is as valid a scientific theory to suggest that later in life their “schizophrenic” symptoms are natural arising due to this suppression as any other.’
Given these standards, it’s as valid a scientific theory to suggest that schizophrenic symptoms naturally arise from the wrath of God, the unconscious rejection of the existence of invisible pink unicorns, or having blasphemed against the Flying Spaghetti Monster in your youth.
The word you’re looking for is ‘hypothesis’.
“Someone show me a mind unnattached to a body or a body unnattached to a mind and I will believe Descartes dualism and that the whole mind/body divide in medicine is therefore rational. Of course, you can’t do that: Why? Because Descartes was logically wrong as is the mind/body divide in medicine.”
I would go into the 400 years of thought that seems to have passed you by (it’s a complicated topic), but I’m more interested in why you think that rejecting the mind/body distinction supports your argument. Aren’t you claiming that diseases of the mind are based purely in mental processes and require psychological treatment (rather than those evil medications)?
“If you say sanity is behaving normally (the usual form of response) then it was mad of columbus to sail round the world and he should have been locked up rather than given control of a ship.”
This is attacking your metaphor, not your argument, but I’m going to do it anyway. Columbus sailed around the world because he had good reasons to believe that he’d end up in India and get rich. Columbus, like most educated people in the Middle Ages and like almost all sailors throughout history was perfectly aware that the world was round. The question of whether he was sane or not simply reveals historical ignorance.
As far as I can work out the anti-psychiatrists think that in order to deal with occasional episodes of psychosis I should spend a year or so in therapy discussing adverse childhood experiences I don’t even remember, having repressed them so deeply. How this will help isn’t explained - although a clearer recipe for ‘false memory syndrome’ is hard to imagine.
This is supposed to be in preference to swallowing a dose of Ami Sulpride for three to Four weeks. Under this latter regime I return to normal (and to work) within a month.
I know which method I would trust and which one I would consider to be highly abusive.
Well put Ariel.
In a nutshell: some things are woth debating over, and some things are just… not.
I’m not pro-psychiatry or anti-psychiatry particularly. I don’t think therapy is the main answer to this issue or all mental health issues. Society is in denial about the subject of Childhood Sexual Abuse. This was the main point of the piece I wrote in the specific context of mental health.
It seems to me that the dislike of what I have written sometimes has less to do with psychiatry/anti-psychiatry and lots to do with this denial.
Denial is played out not just in the individual mind. But in my wide experience the worst culprits for jumping on people who start pulling the rabbit of truth out of the hat of lies are the victims in denial and the perpetrators. It is one of the factors that makes this debate almost impossible to have.
I have, in person, seen the sort of thing the “anti-psychiatrist” Laing was discussing in his theories (or should that be hippopotamus??) of Schizophrenia. Namely a young woman whos’ “Schizophrenic” symtoms were the only way to fit in with an insane family. The mother alcoholic, the father a serial child abuser, the whole family from aunts, uncles and grandma’s pathological liars. Court findings of abuse are still denied by all the people concerned.
I’m not proposing anyone be forced into therapy or anything else. And yes false memories are possible though probably rare in reality. What is really, really common is people who were sexiually abused as children wandering round the world as grown-ups completely unaware of those facts and the effects they are having.
This can range from the extremes I discussed in the original post to people who live otherwise quiet and unassuming lives with perhaps a general sense of disatisfaction or the odd bout of psychosis to full blown dual diagnosis and etc, etc. But they are far from living full lives as I know.
As an adult who grew up not remembering then remembered I know how and why people forget. I will never tell anyone some of the things I now know were done to me - not out of shame but out of respect for the person listening.
Most people who have forgotten don’t want to remember but have no idea what they are losing by not remembering. It makes you whole again and though nothing can remove the past it’s effects can be overcome. But for those who remain in denial it is never gone, even if they dont remember as most seem not to, and the consequences - be they life dulling or entirely maddening (literally) - are like ghosts that haunt them.
A lot of ghosts used to haunt me. They don’t any more. Neither do my appalling metaphors.
and finally …
Bipolarmo wrote:
“Fair enough it would be great for society to prevent further such infections, but for those of us in the here and now, maybe it’s just too late to bother about.”
Yes - and the only way we will stop further infections is to come out of denial about these subjects in hand as a society as a whole.
Freud revised his theories to hysteria - to suit the wealthy Vienniese aristocracy who were paying his bills and preferred to hear their children had sexual fantasies rather than were hurt by being sexually abused.
Since then it seems things have not got much better.
The Irreverant Buddhist - I believe this theme [repressed childhood memories] lies at the heart of mental well being for all of us.
You are correct to point out the Freud [interestingly, I typed Fraud the first time] lacked the courage of his clinical convictions prefering to attribute the sexual abuse of children to fantasy - his motives may have been financial gain, but even today this unpalatable reality remains shrouded in controversy, and half-truths.
Alice Miller has written extensively on this topic, ‘the drama of being a child’ and ‘for your own good’ amongst others are well worth a look.
We ALL seem to have an inate ability to con ourselves when it comes to the difference between what we THINK we do, and what we actually do do.
Look at any fly on the wall footage of parents interacting with their own children and then the subsequent horror on the parents faces when the film is played back to them - often followed by incredulous expressions, such as, ‘I can’t believe I just said [or did] that’, or ‘oh my god, am I really like that’ ?
Whether brain dysfunction can ever be proved to be independent of these adverse events remains the subject of further investigation.
I have heard phrases such as ’schizophrenia is the grave yard of research’ - perhaps because the diagnostic label itself has been called into question, but also because it is virtually impossible to seperate enormously complex environmental, genetic and biological events that may have taken place many years ago with no authoritive record, other than that which can be REMEMBERED.
accident and emergency charge nurse wrote:
“You are correct to point out the Freud [interestingly, I typed Fraud the first time] lacked the courage of his clinical convictions prefering to attribute the sexual abuse of children to fantasy - his motives may have been financial gain, but even today this unpalatable reality remains shrouded in controversy, and half-truths.”
Dear A&E Charge Nurse,
Thats the most wonderful “fraudian slip” I ever did see … and cuts to the truth of these matters in a delightfully parodying way.
Thanks for putting a HOOOOOGE smile on ma face this morning.
TIB
Hi TIB.
I’m not sure what your last point was. Nobody is denying that child abuse happens.
When reading your initial post it was fairly obvious this was an emotive issue for you and I’m sure no one here is going to sway your opinion. But your singular viewpoint reminds me of quite a few people I have met who have resolved their alcohol problems with AA. They are driven like crazed evangelists to spread the word that this is the one and only true way. Their arrogant and blinkered viewpoint does not consider that this might not be the best choice or the effective way forward for other folks. Have you ever considered the possibility that your views may not be 100% correct or that pursuing this line might not be in the best interets of all individuals?
Once again thanks for stimulating the troops into dialogue.
PS Also pmsl at Fraudian slip…. I recently saw a comment on another blog by a radical feminist where someone commented that she had made a Freudian slit.
oops.. sorry for repeats… WordPress said it couldn’t post my comment due to service maintenence and to try again in a minute . Apologies if another 20 copies of my last comment appears.
Dear Bipolarmo
My last point was that people are denying that child abuse happens: Victims are denying it, perpetrators are denying it, medical doctors are denying it, psychiatrists are denying it, politics is denying it and so is the media. Two examples, one general, one highly personal:
1) “Stranger danger” campaigns get millions worldwide. Meanwhile 90% of victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse are actually raped or molested by trusted carers, most usually members of their own family.
2) I first asked for help to deal with my recollections of being systematically raped and tortured from infancy through to age twelve in 2001. The NHS Psychiatrist I saw, after meeting me for 30 minutes, said, “Putting to one side everything you have said about being abused as a child I am sorry to have to tell you that you suffer a Narcicistic Personality Disorder”. When I asked him what this meant, “in reality”, he said, “well you’re not a very nice person basically”. In 2005 he withdrew that diagnosis and appologised for it, “Matthew I am ashamed and embarrassed”. He confirmed my own self-diagnosis of Chronic PTSD as a result of sustained and systematic Childhood Sexual Abuse. I had had to go and see him armed with DGSM IV in hand, and point out the similarity in the diagnostic criteria between the two. I pointed out to him that if he had not put “to one side everything (I) had told him about being abused as a child” that the presence of this extreme and prolongued trauma would have given him no choice but to make the diagnosis of Chronic PTSD in the first place. That’s why he was ashamed and embarrassed, because his Psychiatric skills were swayed by the climate of denial ripe at that moment in time fuelled by the “False Memory Syndrome” protagonists (many of whom you will find cross posting to “Child Love” websites - that basically support Paedophillia and want it legalised).
So yes, Bipolarmo, everyone by and large, and with few exceptions, is denying the absolutely huge scale of Childhood Sexual Abuse. The BBC last week reported that there were “hundreds of thousands” of active paedophiles in the UK today and this is the first time I have ever seen a reasonable media report on that issue. That means hundreds of thousands of kids getting raped today. And people think that isn’t one of the most important realities in relation to mental health? Then they must be mad.
Interestingly you thank me for “stimulating the troops into dialogue”. By chance “The Troops” was the collective name of the multiple personalities of one of the earliest cases of “Multiple Personality Disorder”, now renamed “Dissociative Identity Disorder”. “Truddi Chase” was sexually abused, raped and tortured from age two through to her late teenage years by her stepfather. She had 92 personalities I believe at the final count and wrote a book of her experiences called “When Rabbit Howls”. Striking to me that you should use the term “The Troops” in this context.
TIB
ps I have had similar experiences with AA types and know what you mean. I just think this one issue is far more important than most people want to face up to. I’m not proselytising that it should be the be all and end all of anything. I just think it’s time that, now the taboo has been broken, we finally take off the blinkers properly. That is going to be painful for the whole of our society and why we stay, collectively, in denial.
TIB
Wow, intellectual debate on Mental Nurse. Somewhat inevitable as I haven`t been around to lower the tone.
I think we are in desperate need of more debate as to the aetiology of mental illness. After all, if we`re not sure about the problem then we`ll obviously struggle with the solution. As I see it, the trouble with TIB`s branch of anti-psychiatry is that it has an almost perverse tendency to drive others into the arms of the medical model, in diametric oppposition to its objective. That`s disappointing for those, like me, who would like to see psychiatry take a bit of a kicking.
oldschoolbaby wrote:
“As I see it, the trouble with TIB`s branch of anti-psychiatry is that it has an almost perverse tendency to drive others into the arms of the medical model, in diametric oppposition to its objective. That`s disappointing for those, like me, who would like to see psychiatry take a bit of a kicking.”
I don’t think this was in reply to the below, however to make my point I’l have to quote myself:
“I had had to go and see him armed with DGSM IV in hand, and point out the similarity in the diagnostic criteria between the two. I pointed out to him that if he had not put “to one side everything (I) had told him about being abused as a child” that the presence of this extreme and prolongued trauma would have given him no choice but to make the diagnosis of Chronic PTSD in the first place.”
How can I possibly be described as Anti-Psychiatry? I self diagnosed using the Psychiatrists own manual then sought professional confirmation of the fact which was given. That I also got an appology was something I feel rather lucky about - it comes down to the fact that my Psychiatrist is a good bloke and actually a good Psychiatrist too. I am anti the absolutely overwhelming level of denial about child abuse in our society. And I am against the bias that creates in all fields ijcluding medicine and it’s sub-branch, Psychiatry.
I just want Psychiatry to work and until recognising these facts it will not.
TIB
Apologies TIB, I haven`t the time to devote to this debate that I would like. I`m not dismissing your core argument that childhood sexual abuse can generate severe psychological problems in later life. I`m just highly sceptical about your staistics.
If your argument were proved to be correct and most mental illness is a consequence of abuse as opposed to being attributable to some endogenous, or pathogen induced, biochemical disturbance then I`m not sure that psychiatry, in its current form, is the answer. That`s why I perceive you as being anti - psychiatry. Incidentally, I would classify myself as being rather anti - psychiatry but for different reasons. That is why I`m a bit concerned that the consensus on this site seems to be, no thanks to your hypotheses, I`ll stick with the tablets.
Dear oldschoolboy,
Understood. I’m not suggesting anyone stop taking meds. Anyone who wants to discuss their meds with the prescribing doctor should do so.
Anyone who feels a chasm of meaning inside or an uncertain history of their childhood, or few memories before a certain age (anything greater than about four or five) may not remember their childhood because it was awful.
These sorts of feelings are probably co-morbid with most of the common diagnoses of Psychiatry as it stands. I was given one bad diagnosis, confirmed twice, before being withdrawn and appologised for. I’m a lucky bugger frankly.
Now I am in appropriate psychotherapy and I benefit from it. It is being paid for out of taxpayers money at a cost of twenty five thousand quid a year, which I regret as it would pay for a good nurse somewhere else. This is because my physical injuries have been ignored and overlooked, on psychiatric grounds, to the extent where they threaten my survival.
Had I been given appropriate help when I first asked it wouldn’t have come to this. But this is yet more denial rampant in the system about coming out of the closet as a survivor.
I lack certain basic co-ordination of societal skills that others take for granted and am hypersensitive in other areas. My development in some ways was arrested at the start of the abuse (I still don’t remember exactly when that was but I’m near and I was very young indeed).
I suspect wise chemistry or even plant medicine could benefit my overall recovery. But I don’t really trust the system to provide wise chemistry - more of a guess by guess trial and error kind of thing that may send me anywhere in the mean time. I’m lucky enough to be strong enough to have gone what I went through and remained sane.
The statistic of hundreds of thousands of active paedophiles I got via the BBC from the police, I believe. It came out of an argument about locking them up not being the answer as we would, quite literally, need ten times as many prisons as we have now.
If that is true, and I assume it is and even then possibly an underestimate, it isn’t a long jump to working out the current stats.
Let’s assume they mean 500,000. They weren’t specific but its bang in the middle of the range. There are about 6 million children under ten. Many Paedophiles are repeat and predatory offenders and have multiple victims. But even without counting that it is nearly one in ten, assuming each offender has one victim only.
I know the above analysis is faulted in many ways and simplistic. But to give a ballpark figure it’s good. And I have deliberately estimated on the side of caution. It would suggest to me that ten percent or more of kids under ten are currently being abused. It makes my figures look fairly plausible if you start being more aggressive with the analysis.
If these current stats are right, they will be contributing significantly to all the above discussed problems including Mental Health “presentations” in twenty years. I don’t think anyone would argue with that.
So Hypotamus or no hypotamus, I’m a survivor who remembers now what they did to me and wants people to wake up and smell the coffee. Cos it ain’t good. It’s a part of my recovery process. And regarding tablets, take em, I would not wish to suggest in any way that anyone “shouldn’t”.
Matthew aka The Irreverent Buddhist
TIB it seems to me that your theory is in danger of becoming the psychiatric version of the ducking stool. E.g. if I report memories of abuse this is evidence of abuse. Whereas if I claim to have no memories of abuse this is also…. evidence of abuse! .
No one on this thread has denied that child abuse occurs, nor has anyone disputed that being a victim of abuse can lead to psychological problems in adulthood (personality disorders, conduct disorders, PTSD etc.) But psychological problems are completely different to organic, biological illnesses such as bipolar, schizophrenia or dementia.
Ariel
You may have had a great childhood. Most kids do. I really mean that and it gives me hope. A large percentage do not.
There are certainly some neurochemical disturbances and other organic causes of mental illness. I wouldn”t argue with you.
However the prevelance of abuse and long term effects of abuse are unknown and little researched in both physical and psychological manifestations.
And most survivors probably don’t remember. There is a basic mechanism whereby the brain seems to forget that which it can not process: that which hurts the organism, brain, body, mind too much. So stats mean jack, hence their great variance.
And the average survivor who ends up in an appropriate psychological setting to recover has usually spent seventeen years on the mental health register with diagnoses such as bipolar, schizophrenia, personality disorder .. anything from the long list of psychological problems or disorders and “organic” illnesses.
So the lines are far less distinct than you think. They are indeed very very blurred.
Matthew
You may have had a great childhood. Most kids do. I really mean that and it gives me hope.*
The point is not clear here. Most people have no memories of abuse as they were not abused.
TIB, your post actually makes much more sense now that I know the history behind it. I’m not surprised that you are angry about the countless abuse victims who are just told “Here, take a pill, it will go away”. That’s not the way to deal with it, and that issue should be addressed.
However, I’m not convinced that most people who are suffering from mental illness are repressing childhood trauma, and I think it is dangerous to suggest that. I’m glad that you have found the answer to your problems, but you can’t make swooping statements and force people to accept that they have repressed childhood trauma when they don’t. I think there is a difference between mental illness and psychological problems, and obviously a psychiatrist needs to determine which one the person is suffering from, or even if they have both.
I’m interested to know if you suffer from psychosis yourself, and if you manage that through medication or just therapy. I don’t see how psychosis could be described as a “sane response” or “symptomatic instinct to release tension” as I have seen how much tension psychosis causes in itself, driving the sufferer to suicide.
Just as a side point: I know at least two people (off the top of my head) who had repressed memories of abuse as a child, and suffered flash backs as adults. I also know others who have suffered abuse as children. None of these suffer from mental illness.
On the other hand, Mr Man has never suffered abuse but suffers from Schizophrenia.
Sorry, just another point that came to mind: I would agree that some individuals who suffered abuse as children would turn to drugs as adults to deal with their experiences, and as a result of taking drugs could then start suffering from mental illness, due to the damage to the brain/change in chemicals caused by the drugs. So I actually wouldn’t be surprised if you said that most people with mental illness that was caused by drug use has suffered childhood trauma.
Mr Man’s Wife said:
Nothing I said can be taken as such a recipe for any individual.
We kick up a fuss about the odd kid like Madeline, for a week or two. The hundreds of thousands of kids getting raped daily remain unreported. They aren’t going to be one of the biggest inputs to mental health use in the future?
OK. I give up.
TIB
ps No I don’t suffer Psychosis. I did once suffer drug induced Psychosis as a result of self medicating (to excess) away my pain. I admitted myself. The next day I checked out.
Mr Mans Wife wrote:
…
So three people or ten or however many that makes isn’t a scientifically significant population. You can’t draw conclusions from it. Your friends who were abused but are not repressing it do not suffer mental illness. This is supportive of my theory. It is repressed memories that cause mental illness. Your husband with no memories of abuse suffers mental illness, schizophrenia. Either your husband was abused and does not remember it or he was not abused. if it was the first then my hippopotamus is supported. If the second this is neutral to my hippopotamus as I have already stated most people don’t have memories thankfully because they weren’t abused. If you don’t remember being abused it really doesn’t mean you weren’t I can say that for sure. I never for a moment thought I’d been abused. When my memory started recovering so did my mind in ways I had not realised I was broken.
Oh my God! Prepare to explode…. article in today’s Times Online http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t.....033963.ece
This is one of favourite bits:
What a load of twaddle. There again it makes a change from The Times plugging Sky Plus with every other paragraph. Nice to see that nothing can be discussed without linking it to some popular culture reference. Then the last bit …
*takes deep breath*
hmmmm … ommmmm … hmmmmm … ommmm
Absolute codstrap. Hopefully I be able to medicate myself to forget it before I have a cow. Man.
I wish … and some of you may find this surprising from my earlier posts. If chemistry could provide me with chemicals which would facilitate my memory, reduce the shock and trauma of that recall and help me process the events I still cannot access: I’d be first in the queue.
You see. Really not anti-psychiatry at all: just anti-stuffthatdontwork
Matthew
I lost a post. Here is another one touching on some of the issues discussed here:
Secrets Are Lies Left Untold
Mental
I can’t believe how many of the oints I have been making were touched upon in that earlier pice and its comments. I’m kind of shocked.
And as for all the ninnies saying psychological problems and msental illness are different, etc, etc, the conclusions of the quoted research say it all:
“Results: Symptoms considered indicative of psychosis and schizophrenia, particularly hallucinations, are at least as strongly related to childhood abuse and neglect as many other mental health problems. Recent large-scale general population studies indicate the relationship is a causal one, with a dose-effect.
Conclusion: Several psychological and biological mechanisms by which childhood trauma increases risk for psychosis merit attention. Integration of these different levels of analysis may stimulate a more genuinely integrated bio-psycho-social model of psychosis than currently prevails. Clinical implications include the need for staff training in asking about abuse and the need to offer appropriate psychosocial treatments to patients who have been abused or neglected as children. Prevention issues are also identified.”
or should that be oinks?
One can believe that psychosis is primarily biological in origin AND accommodate the high presence of child abuse among people with psychotic symptoms. Our brains are not static lumps of matter - they are dynamic, ever-changing. New synaptic connections are made with each piece of learning that we do, each new memory that gets laid down. Experience changes our brains, so it is no surprise that child abuse also changes brains.
It could be that the experience of child abuse coupled with a genetic inheritance/in utero acquisition of the kind of neurobiological differences that predispose to psychotic illness leads to particular presentations of that illness (I believe highly critical/abusive voices have been strongly associated with past child abuse)
This debate need not be so polarised. I find the idea that most mental illness can be traced to some form of child abuse is just another form of the old “blame the parents” school of thought that did so much damage in the 20th century.
This bit of research:
Childhood trauma, psychosis and schizophrenia: a literature review with theoretical and clinical implications
There is a link to the full text.
The figures seem to be at an average of about %50 for a fairly specific sample set. Will try and have a proper read of article soon … very busy for next few days though.
It’s not the parents fault or their parents. Childhood Sexual Abuse goes back in time through all human societies in all of time. That is why there is a taboo against it in all societies - not for any of the fancy “genetic danger manifested as taboo” theories but simply because it has always happened and the harm it does has always been recognised.
Despite the taboo it is rife in our society and alive and well. There are clubs you can join, brothels where kids are forced into sex slavery you may visit and etc, etc, etc. Aside from all the kids abused by daddy, uncle John and that nice bloke next door.
One of the main lies about Childhood Sexual Abuse is that it is perpetrated by lone “sick” people. A lot of Childhood Sexual Abuse victims are victims of group activity, well organised and well oiled: Business as normal: and entirely socially acceptable - amongst those who play the game.
These victims may be drugged and or so heavily traumatised they have no conscious recall.
It is impossible at the moment to tell accurately how much of an influencing factor Childhood Sexual Abuse is in mental health issues:
because 1) the taboo is only recently broken 2) there are thus many false assumptions and myths around and 3) because of traumatic forgetting of victims stats mean jack - hence their huge variance, but;
IT IS A BIGGER FACTOR THAN ANYONE WANTS TO ADMIT BECAUSE IT IS SHAMEFUL TO US ALL THAT SO MANY CHILDREN FACE DAILY RAPE AND TORTURE. WE DO NOT WANT TO ADMIT THE MESS WE ARE IN. BRITAIN AS A HIGHLY DEVELOPED AND REPRESSIVE SOCIETY IS ONE OF THE WORST IN THE WORLD:
You may have heard “the english disease” used for many things from laziness to losing at football … it’s original meaning? Coined by mainland Europeans during the 18th - 19th centuries the term referred to for the preference of touring Englishmen for having sex with young children.
Until we as a society wise up to the reality of Childhood Sexual Abuse, it’s prevelance and start doing decent well framed scientific research we will stay in the dark. Denial in one of it’s societal forms accounts for the fact that this research is not happening. This is not just something that affects mental health issues of course.
This debate is interesting and I hope stimulating people to thought. Hopefully some of the mental health workers reading this material will start being more aware in their practice - seek training - or whatever. But we won’t get to any real answers through this medium or in the near future.
It will be another 10 - 20 years before this subject is understood. We will look back at the late twentieth and early 21st centuries as a time of broken innocence and backward responses: we will look back and realise ourselves to have been barbaric.
I think we have probably proven to our satisfaction that Childhood Abuse (of any form) is under reported and probably happens more in society than we could ever dream in our worst nightmares. Also that abuse increases the chances of a mental health diagnosis, a wider range of probable diagnoses than I expected.
This probably needs to be drummed into nurses (doctors, others?) during their training to ensure it becomes a standard part of assessments. A quick:
Is plainly not enough. I know many nurses feel uncomfortable about asking some of these questions, I do, but it has to be done.
But that still leaves most people with mental health problems not having a history of abuse. If we look too hard we will find it where it does not exist:
ps one can belive almost anything one wants to:
Hence so many mothers who were abused, picking abusive partners and chosing to believe they “would never hurt” the kids, whilst upstairs daddy is off raping the little’uns.
There are four mental health victims for you just in this one (average) family and those families are everywhere. Later little Mary might get Schizophrenia whilst little Johnny ends up in prison on drug dealing charges. Mummy copes by popping a mixture of alcohol and pills all her life, to try and self medicate away the pain a) of her original suffering and b) the impossible situation she is in (yet does not recognise even though knowing it) until eventually going completely insane, or succumbing to the sweet relief of dementia. Once the kids have left home Daddy marries a girl about the same age as his daughter and starts a new family: a better family: one that has young kids in it again.
If you live in a big city there are children you see daily who are daily abused. When you are sleeping in your bed at night there are plenty of children being regularly raped with a short distance from the place you sleep soundly.
These facts are not nice. The aftereffects also drive a lot of people into a different form of sanity - one the “sane people” like to label “mad”.
Is this causing 10% of mental health problems? 20%? …. no one knows. But my estimation based on a fairly wide understanding of all the issues is that it is greater than 50% of mental health issues.
This is not to say that a man who receives a brain injury in later life was abused as a child or that there are no strictly organic mental health illnesses. Just that these are much less significant factors in the overall problem than invasive dehumanising torture in the name of someone elses sexual gratification.
Is there any evidence at all that victims of abuse forget their trauma to such an extent that it lies buried for years and years until the right therapist comes along with the key? That sounds utterly counterintuitive to me. If you were to be in a car crash that gave you multiple injuries and was severely traumatic, unless you suffered a brain injury, you would remember the exact date, time and circumstances of that car crash. I don’t believe in denial to the point of forgetting - it makes no sense at all.
Just as a philosophical question. Could we not consider the urge to abuse others to be a form of personality disorder and there, technically, a mental illness ?
I think the evidence on ‘forgotten’ trauma is very debatable at the very least. I have seen people deny past horrors and claim not to remember things, though obviously they are simply unwilling to allow the memories room in their mind. Or at least that is the way I interpreted it.
If someone had suppressed memories so thoroughly that had, to all intents and purposes, forgotten how would we know ?
Fek! How do I unsubscribe from this post?
I think this whole debate about the aetiology of mental illnesses raises another interesting question. If we were ever able to determine exact causes would this actually have any bearing on how the illness should subsequently be treated or managed? Would environmental causes necessarily imply that biological approaches to treatment were any less appropriate?
Take epilespy for example. Many people are born with the condition but I know of one woman who developed it as a result of a brain injury. But her treatment was standard - anti convulsants. No one ever suggested she should have therapy to address the trauma of the car crash, or suggested that if she did so this would have the effect of remitting her symptoms. No amount of talking would reverse the damage.
We know from family studies that there is a strong genetic component to bipolar, but we also know from twin studies that genetics does not explain the whole picture. As far as I know the only environmental factor for which strong evidence exists is death of the mother in the first five years of life (which leads to higher rates of psychosis in adulthood). The infant brain is still developing and it seems reasonable to assume that such a devastating trauma could damage the emotional centres of the brain and stop them developing properly. What I find hard to understand is how any amount of talking, years later, is likely to reverse this damage. And the resulting psychotic symptoms would still need to be treated.
If death of the mother can cause the kind of brain damage that results in psychosis then I see no reason why abuse or neglect in childhood might not have the same effect. But if the brain is damaged then no amount of talking is likely to repair it. I’m unclear as to what might be gained by getting the patient to talk about such distressing events, other than to put them under emotional stress, possibly to the point of actually precipitating an episode of psychosis.
**************************************************
Health warning. In this post I am revealing some details of sexual abuse committed against me as an infant and child. If you don’t want to read about it don’t read about it. It answers some questions that have been asked.
**************************************************
Beakie: Is there any evidence at all that victims of abuse forget their trauma to such an extent that it lies buried for years and years until the right therapist comes along with the key?
A therapist is rarely the key in my experience.
In 1994 I went and saw my GP and said I needed therapy. I told her I experienced a void of meaning inside that hurt. And she told me I was too sane to be helped.
I shopped around a little. Saw a few types. What a bunch of quacks. Even the highly regarded NHS Genius I saw privately - actually he was one of the worst.
In 1997 I suffered drug induced psychosis and was admitted to a mental health ward. I stayed a night and left because of what I consaidered to be their unhealthy interest in me. I had been (over) self-medicating with canabis to cope with my pain.
In 1999 I moved to a Buddhist centre and lived there for the next eighteen months. I meditated a lot under the instruction of Tibetain, Japanese and other masters. Nothing fancy, no visualisations, just lots and lots of sitting still and breathing and experiencing my still(ish) body and running mind. As my mind unwound over those eighteen months I started getting flashbacks. I started remembering being the rapes.
When I left in September 2000 I “knew” I had been abused. I still did not want to accept it. I thought it had started when i was about seven - I was wrong there by a mile. I had no concept of the fact that it was my body that was raped. That the fingers typing this were writhing in agony as I was repeatedly orally and anally raped for years from some time before my first birthday until I was twelve.
What this sort of abuse does, and it is the most common and pernicious kind, is to divide the self. This is particularly true when the trusted authority figures around you are abusing and enabling the abuse. How can you let daddy rape you again and again and then sit eating breakfast and playing happy families like it didn’t happen? And why the **** is mum not doing anything about this? I know she knows … Too many incongruencies and the sense of self is what shatters. Only if there is more than one self-contained personality inside one body is this situation liveable.
Dissociation from the events of the trauma becomes dissociation from the body (and I believe there are common learned musculoskeletal responses that inhibit neurology and allow this dissociation - hence the “psychological” sequelea may well be actually physically based in any case, at root). Dissociation from the body turns into dissociation into different personalities to cope with the ongoing horror. This becomes established as the child is socialised around the ages of 2 - 6 depending on when the abuse begins and other environmental factors. If the child is first abused later than about age six they probably will never split. They may not tell because of threats but they will always have known they were abused. This is not an absolute rule however and older children who are horrifically abused and threatened can split.
Thereafter the little boy or girl sitting down to breakfast with daddy is not the same one as the one daddy sneaks into bed with. That one may even learn to enjoy the sexual invasion and physical contact - after all it is all it has (and this is where paedophiles come from to answer Mental’s question - the harmful side, the hurt side becomes stronger than the human compassionate side in these people and they are thus rendered in control - Dissociative Identity Disorder left unchecked can turn into: paedophillia, schizophrenia etc). And rarely do abuse victims end up with only two personalities.
I was left with somewhere in the region of a hundred, is my best guess, age 18 when I went to Uni. They each had important roles to play in guarding me from the reality I had/was experiencing. I was an addict, a druggie, a drunk, sexually promiscuous and aggressive but brilliant. I left out of boredom with no degree and beame a very successful stockbroker. But inside there was this ominous hole …
… now I have resolved much of the trauma. Memories come back as the parts of me that separated decide its time to rejoin the pack. I can be triggered to switch into a different personality completely but this doesn’t happen too much. The hurt ones stay in the background by and large. I had five personalities left until about two months ago when another merged into adult me. That one brought certain emotional contents related to the abuse, I finally realised that it was this body, my body. that was raped and tortured by these experiences. I also regained something I can only describe as a sense of “joy at being” and a sense of being my own boss.
The four that are left have an interesting dynamic. Adult me has consistent memories of being from age twelve onwards. Everything that comes to me from before that comes in the blink of an eye from one of the other three. Slowly they are revealing to me their truth. It is not very nice for them or for me but we are all in agreement it is how we want to move forward.
Without painting the whole picture I know I was abused by fifty three men before I was twelve. I know the identity of about fifteen of these persons without counting. I have flashbacks to some of the earliest rapes age
…. continued .. cos it got lost (post too long??) if you can rescue it Mental please do so
… (age) one. these memories are intact because they are so strong.
The abuse has been proven by physical findings. (thinned and scarred internal anal sphincter, muscular damage to my neck causing neurological problems, etc.)
So to answer your question Beakie, yes … you can forget completely and then remember later. But the key is not a therapist it is your own peace of mind: therapy may help.
Thanks for giving us some background on the strength of your feelings on the issue of childhood abuse. I will have nightmares for a long time to come. The one upside is that your experience shows that, even with some of the worst abuse I have heard described, people can ‘resolve their trauma’ and fix the mental harm done to them.
Still hope your statistics are very wrong.
A Poem I wrote before 3 & 4 merged recently
Little frightened sad and angry,
Big and mean and very handy,
Then there’s one who’s full o life,
another who would take a wife,
And the baby, scared to be,
These are all colours and flavours of me.
1,2 me and 5 want to say a big thankyou to everyone here for having such a sensible debate on this subject.
I think some of what has been said could be very informative for health professionals accross all fields. I would suggest all doctors and nurses need a greater awareness in training. The place of CSA in the aetiology of all aspects of physical and mental health in the general population is underestimated and needs careful reconsideration. Freuds theories have to be ditched and his earlier ones revoked. Psychiatry and physical medicine need to be overhauled and brought into one metaphore: Two examples from physical medicine:
63% of infant abuse victims, in the only study I could locate by the Red Cross in Durban, needed surgery. Sphincters, pelvic floor repair, stomas etc. There are tens of thousands of people running around with “conversion disorder” and “somatization disorder” diagnosis with overlooked chilhood polytrauma and associated compensations. As the trauma was inflicted before the child was mobile they look normal having copied others around them for clues as to how to use their bodies as all infants do.
And no one has asked why, of the three groups in whom internal rectal prolapse is common, boys under three year old should be one. Simply: Childhood sexual abuse. It is the known cause of my own internal injureies … includsing internal rectal prolapse. And boys particularly: they don’t have vagina’s to penetrate.
One general scientific point that benefits from clarification:
Ariel said, “We know from family studies that there is a strong genetic component to bipolar”
Family studies are methodologically faulted when looking for evidence of genetic components in mental health: The family that passes on the genes also most usually passes on it behaviour, thinking and social models. Where do you differentiate between a genetic and experientally passed on trait in behaviour such as mental health issues? You probably can not, with the exception of separated-at-birth-twin studies.
TIP, you have the forbearance of a saint. I have no patience with those who frame childhood abuse as debatable etiology, and our critique as “anti-psychiatry” is pure straw man. What you’re telling needs to be said, and you have my support. The twisted abuse you’ve taken on by the collaborators of soul murder was hard to read. Which makes your continued participation a courageous and altruistic act.
One Trackback
[...] I have started an “intellectual debate”, with a posting on mentalnurse: “oldschoolbaby [...]