Mental health issues?  Life getting you down?  Suffering from the loss of a loved one?

Most people, when finding life a tough go for themselves or their children, will go to a psychiatrist for help as this is who they feel may be able to help them or at least offer some relief.

This decision could possibly cost you your life…..

…. and I don’t say this heedlessly.

Psychiatrists are trained to diagnose and treat their patients with the aid of the ***DSM – Diagnostical & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (please see below).  A very high majority will then prescribe a medication to alleviate distress, anxiety, grief – almost any negative emotion any of us are hit with at some point in our lives.  Drugs that do harm.  Drugs that may temporarily lift whatever cloud is hanging over you, but may (and in most cases will) in the long run, cause a lot more anguish than what you started out with.

The word medication is such a benign, gentle word isn’t it?  It has  the nuance of something that’s going to help you or cure you of your symptoms or at the very least, relieve you in some way.   Funny thing is (or not so funny)  that the drugs your psychiatrist OR General Practitioner will prescribe are highly toxic.

I have come across a very informative video, an interview with Genita Petralli, a nutritional biochemist.  You may find some truths in it or some data that may be useful to you.  I hope so. Before starting any drug regimen, at the very least, I ask you to do your own research and for heaven’s sake, stay away from the Pharmaceutical Co.’s “chemical imbalance” propaganda bulls#*t sites.  They’d like to keep you on their medication for life.  YOU are a very lucrative subject.

***THE DSM:

The DSM is not without major flaws and the slotting of yourself (or allowing yourself to be slotted) in a DSM category can be harmful, effecting how you think of yourself, how active or passive you are in your life, and what kind of possibilities open up for you to move your life in the direction you want.

As you look at the DSM IV please be aware that:

1.      The DSM categories are neither scientifically based nor value free.  They were created  by the consensus of a small group of people – mostly white, upper middle class American men – and can not help but reflect their values. These may or may not be your values.  Please get this.  These diagnoses are voted on – THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC BASED RESEARCH TO BACK IT UP.

2..      Diagnosis suppresses the uniqueness of the individual. To fit yourself into a DSM category it is necessary to take a very simplified look at a complex life, highlighting some events and ignoring others. The parts of you that are excluded from the picture are probably at least as important as the parts that are included.

3.      The DSM is deficit focused. It focuses on what you’re not doing well rather then what you are doing well. Putting too much focus on what you’re not doing well runs the very real risk of the problem becoming an even bigger part of your life, increasing its influence over the way you understand your self and further reducing the possible pathways to change.

4.      The DSM supports a medical model of mind in which the psychologist or psychiatrist is an expert on you. He/she tells you what is wrong with you and then tells you what to do to set it right. In fact no one, outside yourself, can fully understand you or your problems. There is no expert who can tell, with any validity, what caused your current behaviours or problems, what they mean, what needs to be done or how it will unfold or turnout. Clinicians can help you clarify your own knowledge and they can offer you their expertise, i.e. thoughts from their own lives, from working with others with similar struggles and from reading they have done. It is up to you to decide what is helpful and what isn’t.

5.      The DSM focuses on the individual not the environment. The DSM views problems as residing within the individual. Thinking of problems this way leads to certain pathways forward and away from others. It’s also possible to see problems as residing within the family, within a system (school, government, etc) and/or within culture.