Alternative Treatments To Mental Illnesses

This blog is aimed at any person suffering from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety/depression, autism etc...

These videos are very insightful. I'm positive you'll gain from them. They portray possible alternatives to the mental health system, shamanism, nutrition, psychotherapy, meditation and protest against draconian mental health legislation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h12_kRYITTA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0agtlyiNW4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRqN-X3an1Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gFB4wVPpAU&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=C27A8C0755C33527

I'm not sure if this stuff is real but it's really cool...and scary.

http://www.livevideo.com/liveshow/ExtraordinaryRendition/archive_729006.aspx

http://www.livevideo.com/liveshow/ExtraordinaryRendition/archive_728990.aspx

Someone left an excellent comment for one of them:
"Now you let the cat out of the bag.
Establishment Big Pharma has been feeding Big Brother this idea of feeding and bringing forth a submissive population. When the population at large have each a chronic body imbalance, they will not be at liberty to agitate for change. They will be complacent. Like drugged sheep and cattle. In other words, easy to handle. Now you start people thinking, That's dangerous."

"People are difficult to govern because they have to much knowledge."
(Lao-tzu)

When you think of it, there are a lot of strange people out there. What makes them their strangest, is the inability to fit into the conforms of society. 'Crazy' people don't want to admit that they're crazy. Well who wants to admit there is something wrong with them? Perhaps people being seen as unstable are just more sensitive to the tragities in life. They have a heightened sense of awareness. Reason can be very unreasonable. There's no right or wrong. You just have to follow your own intuition.
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-John Lennon

This is the story of John F. Nash Jr. and how he overcame schizophrenia without the use of debilitating medications.

"John's mental state was beginning to deteriorate. It is thought that his psychotic break occurred primarily from anxiety about his work and Alicia's pregnancy. His friends first noticed his odd behaviour when he arrived at a New Year's Eve party dressed as a baby and spent the entire evening curled up on Alicia's lap, sucking his thumb. In his game theory course, he appointed a graduate student to teach and disappeared for several weeks, suddenly appearing in the commons at MIT. There, he began exclaiming that aliens were sending him encrypted messages through the New York Times. He also interrupted a lecture to say that he was on the cover of LIFE magazine, disguised as the pope, and he knew this because twenty-three was his favorite prime number.
On the campus, he began noticing many people wearing red ties. He thought that the men were members of a secret communist organization and began watching them carefully. When the University of Chicago offered him a prestigious position in their faculty, John turned it down, saying that he was scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica. He talked to his colleagues about extraterrestrial creatures and secret government agencies working to destroy his credibility and reputation, greatly disturbing them.
The math department chairman relieved John of his teaching responsibilities, thinking that he was having a nervous breakdown. Eventually, John was hospitalized at McLean private hospital near Boston. John was terrified of being locked up, thinking that he didn't belong there. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and given Thorazine to calm him down. His treatment there was psychoanalysis and his doctors referred to him as "Professor". After he was released, he resigned from MIT and withdrew his pension to move to Europe. In Europe, he made various attempts to renounce his citizenship in the United States and declare refugee status. Alicia followed him to Europe and had him deported back to the United States. Although he was flown back to the United States, he claimed that he had been put in chains and sent back in a ship, like a slave. Back in the US, John started hanging around at Princeton, talking about himself in the third person, writing bizarre postcards, and lecturing endlessly about numerology.
Alicia took up a job in Princeton and managed to support their family. She managed to convince the faculty at Princeton to give her husband small amounts of work in mathematics in an attempt to help him back into the society. However, he refused to sign W-4 forms saying that the government was conspiring against him. He continued to make pay phone calls to his family members using fictitious names.
In 1961, John was committed by Alicia and his sisters to Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey. There, he was subjected to insulin-coma therapy, which involved injecting the patient with large amounts of insulin to put them into a coma, often causing seizures. His colleagues in mathematics were outraged and wrote a letter to the hospital, urging the doctors to protect his mind for the good of humanity. He was discharged after six months of the insulin treatment and looked absolutely terrible to his family members.
His former colleagues at Princeton found him some research work and he published a paper on Fluid Dynamics, his first work in four years. He left for Europe again, sending bizarre postcards to his family with cryptic messages and mathematical theorems. He returned shortly afterward, looking rather haggard. In 1962 Alicia filed for a divorce and John moved in with Eleanor and his first son. She complained that he had deserted her without child support and resented her for committing him. His colleagues in Boston got him an apartment and arranged for him to meet with a psychiatrist, who prescribed anti psychotic drugs. He began to improve dramatically, beginning to look like the old Nash for the first time in years. He was much nicer and his egotistical nature had completely disappeared. He even began meeting with Eleanor and seeing his first son.
Less than a year after moving to Boston, he stopped taking his medicine, causing his symptoms to resurface. He said that he stopped taking the medication mainly because of his feeling of exhaustion and inability to concentrate on his work. This time, he heard voices along with his visual delusions. The voices constantly criticized his behavior and greatly deteriorated his mental condition.
In 1970, Alicia allowed John to move in with her and their son, promising to never commit him again to a hospital. She took him not only as a husband, but to prevent him from living on the streets as a homeless beggar. He began showing up on Princeton, writing mathematical formulas all over campus and developing a reputation as "The Phantom" due to his extreme introversion. Myths developed, with students telling each other that he had been driven to madness as a result of trying to solve an overly complex mathematical problem.
Over the next decade, he continued to wander the campus, working independently on mathematical problems. Some time in the 1980s, he finally overcame his mental illness learning to reject the voices that he heard in his head. His recovery was gradual, but allowed him to slowly become mentally fit, allowing him to regain a role in society. He said that his recovery was as a result of his decision to think rationally. Over time his idea of an equilibrium point in game theory had finally caught the proper attention and became a cornerstone of modern economics. Economists mostly used his ideas to attempt to predict occurrences in the world economy. Members of the Nobel committee finally decided to award Nash the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994, despite fears of him causing a major embarrassment. People were shocked that a man suffering from schizophrenia for so many years was able to recover and receive such a prestigious award.
Today, Nash serves in the department of mathematics at Princeton. He has since remarried Alicia and found that his own son also suffers from schizophrenia. He has also reconnected with his oldest son, John Stier. His life was immortalized in the film "A Beautiful Mind", with his character portrayed by Russell Crowe."
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"Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively”
-Voltaire
Most people aren't aware of it yet but psychiatry tends to over diagnose people, without mentioning what the real reason for their problems are in the first place. Society never takes the blame for screwing us up. The problem is always a personal one. This type of propaganda keeps us in line so we can still pay the bills and go to work, no matter how stressful and unrewarding life has become for us.
There are 4.5 million americans with depression. That's enough people to make a whole country in itself. The number of people taking anti depressants has doubled in only a decade. Something isn't right about this. It pains me to think of what might of happened to someone like Albert Einstein if he would have been treated for his eccentricities. Some say he had high functioning autism. His brain processed large amounts of information at once. But he had the logic to formulate his thoughts and establish a career. Einstein said that he would go away for weeks at a time in a state of confusion. The guy had to many ideas is all. He was busy all the time thinking and experimenting. If he would have been drugged for his condition I doubt he would be able to think as well. Instead of developing his theory of general relitivity and winning the nobel prize for physics, he might have just stayed at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland.
“As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.”
- Einstein
http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/96mar/einstein.html <<<<< Einstine bio
You can always trust the information given to you by people who are crazy. They have an access to truth not available through regular channels.
- Sheila Ballantvne
Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
-Norah Ephron
There are some that would never have made it where they are today if their disorder was treated early on in life. Your pain is your muse. And crazy people can be strangely admerable when they're in the publics eye. The media loves following them. Their condition made them famouse!

A few years ago I started reading activist journalism stuff like Adbusters. Then I learned about how to live off of wildlife. Hey I'm no nomad. But at least I try to live as naturally as possible. It's better then nothing. We live in an either/ or world. If you can't do one or the other, shoot for the middle I always say. I've taught my parents about this stuff and they're slowly changing their lifestyles for the better. Mom's growing her own garlic, because she's tierd of getting the stuff that's been shipped all the way from China. In a gentle way, you can shake the world.

I highly recomend the book Man And His Symbols by Carl G. Jung. His work was aimed at the public as a whole, rather then just phsyciatrists. His theory is that imagination must be taken more seriously, as one of the most distinctive characteristics in human beings. Some of his theories will blow your mind. They're such a different way at looking at things, but yet they make absoulutly perfect sense. "
“It is true however that in recent times civilized man has acquired a certain amount of will power, which he can apply where he pleases. He has learned to do this work efficiently without having recourse to chanting and drumming to hypnotize him into the state of doing. He can even dispense with a daily prayer for divine aid. He can carry out what he proposes to do, and he can apparently translate his ideas into action without a hitch, whereas the primitive seems to be hampered at each step by fears, superstitions, and other unseen obstacles to action. The motto “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is the superstition of a modern man.
Yet in order to sustain his creed, contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by “powers” that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food – and, above all, a large array of neuroses. “

The sad truth is that that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites – day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.
It was precisely this conflict within man that led the early Christians to expect and hope for an early end to this world, or the Buddhists to reject all earthly desires and aspirations. These basic answers would be frankly suicidal if they were not linked up with peculiar mental and moral ideas and practices that constitute the bulk of both religions and that, to a certain extent, modify their radical denial of the world.

There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced that they make sense; he is crushed when, on top of all his misfortunes, he has to admit that he is taking a part in a “tale told by an idiot”. -Jung
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I have a problem with trying to save people instead of focusing on myself. In, pop phsycology, they call this "wounded bird syndrome" I call it empathy. There's nothing wrong with wanting to help people. Society has been trained to be extremely competitve. But some people still have a nurturing insticnt to protect from harms way. We evolved helping eachother to brave the elements in order to survive. There's no better therapy, then talking to omeone who cares about you.

STRESS
Now that we have no need to hunt or gather, we find ourselves at a loss with each other. With no wild beasts left to conquer, man turns on his fellow creatures. Suppose this world is chaotic and stressful. It takes allot of consentration, focus and logic to succeed. People grow up away from home in organised learning institutions called schools, wich are governed a hell of allot like correctional facillities (prisons) both run by the government. In this stage of developement kids need all the experience they can get to develope a mind of their own for the upcoming "real world" they keep hearing about. But everything in the civilized world goes against their natural developement. Just when they get used to living in captivity, they must quickly learn to fend for themselves. We develope mental problems in our teens and twenties because of the overwhelming stress upon entering the real world. Every single person, I've met (or have seen in the media), with mental problems like manic depression/ anxiety, bipolar disorder and even skitsophrenia, all seem to have one thing in common. They are all highly intelligent. (As well as sensitive.) Every single one of them. A bad combination in these violent times. Perhaps the terror of knowing what's really going on drives us over the edge. Being aware of the truth can be a bitter pill to swallow. There are many ways to controll people in society and make them obedient. Some people just feel like they want to live life alive. If they feel trapped it drives them crazy. Science has proven that the instinct to escape repression is incoded in our DNA. As long as we're living creatures, we'll crave freedom. Like a bird in an open cage, No matter how long it's lived in captivity, it will try to fly free.
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When was the last time you sobbed? Bad things happen all the time. There are many reasons to cry these days. People get fired, divorced, die, and no news is good news. You should see people crying away their blues everywhere. But you don't. Especially men. In America, after the great war, emotions as well as any display of affection between men, were seen as being emasculate. In family photos predating the war, men could be seen leaning close together, without the bias of homosexuality. But in most other countries around the world, showing emotions isn't a sign of weakness. When we hold in our tears, the chemicals that make us emotional build up inside of us. They don't go away unless there's some sort of release. We can't get full control of ourselves untill these feelings are expressed.