Anatomy of an Epidemic

Anti-psychotics cause the chemical imbalance they’re said to treat. this has been known as scientific fact since the 1940s! This is just one of the startling facts that this book , Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker has brought to my attention. I have been diagnosed as Schizophrenic, and I am on long term Anti-psychotic medication at the moment, so as I read this book, an anger is bubbling up in me as I realise how I’ve been used by the mental health system, so much so that I have to write this before I even finish the book!

Whitaker explores the origins of psychiatry and exposes the quackery that went on when the owners of various asylums where the mentally ill were segregated to stop them passing on their faulty genes in an injustice inspired by eugenics began to experiment on the patients. Ice baths, lobotomies with ice picks through the eye into the frontal cortex scrambling the brain, insulin comas, eletro convulsive therapy and poisons injected to cause seizures, teeth pulled, These early psychiatrists did anything to find a cure, going at patients with tools in a fervor inspired by the magic bullet cure discoveries of insulin and penicillin at the time.

Finally, they found that these Anti-psychotics seemed to temporarily stop psychosis. but patients developed parkinsons disease long term. They claimed there was a chemical imbalance in the brain that these drugs cured. that was disproven, and in fact it was then found that these drugs actually cause a chemical imbalance in the brain. Studies were done over the years clearly showing key points:

-Anti-psychotics worsen the ‘illness’ with patients on them becoming more prone to psychosis and having terrible outcomes long term

-Anti-psychotics cause tardive diskenesia from basal ganglia damage which then causes a permanent, irreversible tardive psychosis from which there is no recovery

-75 % of patients on long term meds end up with dementia

-Those who recover are those who had very little or never took antipsychotics

The medications actually cause the illness. this has been known since the 1940s, and was just swept under the rug. Whats worse, patients are forced by law to take these medications, under duress, coercion and with no informed consent. The drugs shrink the frontal cortex and white brain matter, enlarge the ventricles, damage the hippocampus and cause an overgrowth of dopamine receptors which causes dopamine hypersensitivity and guarantees you go psychotic if you try to stop the meds.

The meds put the brakes on dopamine production, which makes the brain react and grow more receptors, like an accelerator being floored. so the brakes and accelerator are both on, and if you remove the meds (the brakes) you go headfirst off the cliff of psychosis.

Psychiatists cant be that stupid as to not know this information, or be ignorant of it, or even to sweep it under the rug! But that’s the case, I should’ve been told of this and I wasn’t. Certain doctors around the world have been found to be paid by drug companies in large amounts and this too, is a proven fact.

I cant begin to describe how much of an injustice this is! Being forced to take drugs against your will that make you sicker, not to mention the long list of side effects including sudden death. patients who complain are slapped on more drugs for the side effects. Most patients cant get off the injection so cant taper down off meds in pill form, the only safe way.

I am left with such righteous indignation and anger at the system its ridiculous. I am on long term Anti-psychotics and was never told of these risks or studies. My outcome has been made a bleak one of repeated psychosis, culminating in permanent psychosis and dementia if I don’t do something soon!

Now begins the arduous task of getting off the injection onto pills and then getting these pills reduced at a slow rate for years until I’m drug free. And then more years for my brain to recover (if it can) and hopefully Ill be normal again, with 20 years of my life lost to ‘Schizophrenia’ at the hand of this corrupt, pathetic system.

Wish me luck, and read that book,

Peace