Mental-health facts

[The Straight Story]

Mental-health facts
Sunday, March 8, 2009 4:16 AM

• In 2006, 56 percent of inmates in state prisons and 64 percent of jail inmates had a diagnosable mental illness.

• One out of three offenders at the Ohio Department of Youth Services has a mental illness; three of four have a substance-abuse disorder.

• Cuyahoga County found that one in three homeless people is severely mentally ill.

• Bipolar disorder affects 5.7 million adult Americans, 2.6 percent of the adult population.

• 2.3 million adults in Ohio have a diagnosable mental disorder; 522,000 have serious issues such as bipolar disorder, major depression and schizophrenia.

• More than half the students 14 or older who suffer from a mental disorder will drop out of high school.

• Ohio has two suicides on average for every homicide; 90 percent of those who take their own life have a mental disorder.

• Adults with serious mental illness die 25 years younger than other Americans.

http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/03/08/fact_box_text.ART_ART_03-08-09_A6_J8D54SD.html?sid=101

[hlthe2b]

1. 'Hard to be positive about a society that treats the ill among them

--both mentally and physically ill--so horrendously....Even harder to feel so helpless to change it...

[Juche]

4. True

In my view, I think its a defense because mental illness shows us things we don't want to see. THe idea that a person's opinions, emotions and personality are made up of malleable chemicals is not something most people want to accept. Most people want to believe our personalities are etherical, almost spiritual substances that hover around us and that we are in control of, not mere expressions of brain chemicals that are just as ordinary as the chemicals you'd find in a pond or a tree.

Also we have let the meme that 'nobody recovers from a mental illness' reach everywhere. People still believe that if you get a mental illness as a teenager, it is a downward slope until you die in your 50s. For some sadly this is true but in between social therapy, nutrition therapy, alternative therapy and pharmaceutical therapy mental illness is highly treatable. I think mental illness has higher success rates for treatment than heart disease now.

I really think if we are going to make progress on fighting the stigma we have to address those two problems. The resistance people have to knowing that the mind and brain are the same thing and that our opinions and feelings are not 100% under our control, and the idea people have that a mental illness is untreatable and dooms you to a life of poverty and shame.

[tridim]

2. And if you use Cannabis for stress relief you're a criminal.

Just like a rapist and a murderer.

[roughsatori]

6. The problem with cannabis is that it exacerbates symptomatology of many who are mentally ill.

Marijuana should be legal in the USA.

However, my experience working with chronically mentally ill individuals has illustrated the exquisite sensitivity that those patients have in regards to marijuana and the unfortunate fact that it tends to trigger de-compensation. For many mentally ill patients the use of marijuana causes relapse into schizo-affective disorder the leads them back to institutionalization and homelessness.

[tridim]

7. I wish there could be better studies done

because IMO it helps alleviate more mild mental health issues than it exacerbates. That's why I mentioned stress and not schizophrenia.

It would be great if patients could talk seriously with their doctor about it instead of worrying about doing prison time.

[roughsatori]

8. I work with chronically mentally ill persons who have spent much of life in hospitals and prisons

Stress in itself is not a mental illness. But for simple stress in individula with out a concurrent major mental illness marijuana is safer than the Benzos that docs prescribe so freely. That is if the patient is not arrested. Stress is a condition of life, we need it to survive, but it is not a mental illness.

[undergroundpanther]

9. PSTD is a mental issue CAUSED by stress

I know it firsthand,post traumatic STRESS can kill you because along with dealing with the symptoms of the stress INJURY,you can't sleep,you get depressed,and your life generally sucks and if the nature of the trauma includes betrayal or abandonment, it is worse. In PSTD trust has been destroyed. PSTD isn't a mental illness per se, it is more like a psychiatric injury caused by extreme or prolonged severe stress that fries the synapses.There are brain scars you can see in an MRI left behind in many PSTD sufferers.Including me.

I think most mental illness has a stress driven social component to it that gets ignored when therapists only focus on the individual tend to miss. I think mental illness is made worse by loneliness,alienation,feeling abandoned,being ridiculed and not listened to,and put into catch 22's the person cannot handle along with stress,abuse day after day.
Yes some people express it as mean voices in their heads or as jumping every time a car backfires.But you have to admit our society to me, obviously isn't the sanest way to live,after all we are killing the only planet we have and our social structures prevent certain people from being heard so being depressed actually makes sense here.
And I think it is normal considering the shit that may come to bite us in the ass later,I think those oblivious normals, happy go lucky people who do not want to think,and sociopaths are the real 'crazy ones'
Until psychology has the guts to admit we are not a bunch of islands there will be answers found that some won't like hearing or want to admit to..Radical psych is onto something,check out Bruce Levine..


Here on this page are characteristics of a healing social environment.At Sotera house..Check it out.
http://www.moshersoteria.com/soteri.htm
Here the conflicts that cause a 'crazy making' situations that leads to "mental illness"
http://www.successfulschizophrenia.org/
Radical psych..
http://www.emotional-literacy.com/rpbrief.htm

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

13. That might be why they wrote stress in and of itself is not a mental illness.

[undergroundpanther]

16. but...

PSTD DOES respond to therapy and the drugs are used to cut the anxiety and help sleep or relieve the depression caused by PSTD, it sometimes helps sometimes not..
I was misdiagnosed with every fucking label you can think of until,finally,I guess they ran out of the kinds of labels they preferred and they realized anti psychotics in huge doses ,the lithium,the drug cocktails used on 'mental illness 'didn't help me. So after over ten years of misdiagnoses and being basically re-traumatized all to hell, they admitted I have PSTD. Funny they ignored what was written in my admission papers it was there clear as day,the abuse I had lived through,but the "professionals" preferred to IGNORE it and blame it on a "mental illness" and fuck me over and mess up my head even worse..And now I fucking do not trust any shrink that is hung up on bio psych models or behavior mod crap because I hate that shit..

[midnight]

3. Mental illness is the leprosy of our time.

[Posteritatis]

5. Worse, I'd say - there were never that many idiots who denied leprosy even existed (nt)

[Hannah Bell]

10. yeah, yeah, we're all sick & need to be controlled & medicated by our betters.

[undergroundpanther]

11. Remember Hitler Killed the "mentally unfit" first...

And I really hate the PATRONIZING,CONTROLLING ,SANCTIMONIOUS bullshit some of these so called "professionals" exude.

Mental illness is like the canary in the coal mine because it speaks of why our social structures are sickening us and are wrong. Mental illness has a message inside it.It takes emotional literacy and compassion,and a desire to listen instead of control to hear it.

Too bad the snotty jerks that talk down to us and want to drug us into a stupor so we don't have those embarrassing, upsetting symptoms anymore scaring the normals.. will continue to fail to understand this,because they don't like what it says about "psychology" and the way our society is built and 'organized' upon the abuse and exploitation of human beings by other humans.



Soteria House

Basically, the Soteria method can be characterized as the 24 hour a day application of interpersonal phenomenologic interventions by a nonprofessional staff, usually without neuroleptic drug treatment, in the context of a small, homelike, quiet, supportive, protective, and tolerant social environment. The core practice of interpersonal phenomenology focuses on the development of a nonintrusive, noncontrolling but actively empathetic relationship with the psychotic person without having to do anything explicitly therapeutic or controlling. In shorthand, it can be characterized as "being with," "standing by attentively," "trying to put your feet into the other person's shoes," or "being an LSD trip guide" (remember, this was the early 1970s in California). The aim is to develop, over time, a shared experience of the meaningfulness of the client's individual social context-current and historical. Note, there were no therapeutic "sessions" at Soteria. However, a great deal of "therapy" took place there as staff worked gently to build bridges, over time, between individuals' emotionally disorganized states to the life events that seemed to have precipitated their psychological disintegration. The context within the house was one of positive expectations that reorganization and reintegration would occur as a result of these seemingly minimalist interventions.

http://www.moshersoteria.com/soteri.htm

[ColbertWatcher]

22. That's a bit of an exaggeration.

Some people are genuinely sick and there are some who might take avantage of them.

However, there are far more people who are genuinely sick whose illnesses are being ignored--just like all healthcare in this country.

[Naturyl]

12. Here's a clue

Not to be condescending or confrontational, but some skepticism of the existing "mental health" industry can be very illuminating. To make a long story short, disorders can simply be invented until everyone qualifies for one. Consider the fact that over 50% of the contributors to the DSM IV (standard psychiatric diagnostic manual) had drug industry connections. Interesting, eh?

Sadly, health care in America is a capitalist enterprise. Cash is king, and mental health diagnoses are "insanely" profitable.

[undergroundpanther]

14. yep

The definition of power as the ability to compel obedience fails to distinguish between coercive and non-coercive means of securing obedience.So we have a social problem manifesting as individuals with symptoms society would label 'deviant' or 'weird'.Psychiatry/psychology by focusing on the individual as the problem,the bigger problems get ignored.And the atomization of scientific disciplines into different areas of 'expertise' ensures the picture of what is happening and why is never seen in it's totality..to see it in it's true cruel senseless reality would make us all feel sick inside.

http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=55279&cat=19

[Hannah Bell]

15. Striking correlation between "mental illness" & poverty, ain't it?

Gee, criminals & poor people - crazy!

Good excuse to rescind their human rights.

[undergroundpanther]

17. Agreed

Poverty is blamed on anything but the actual causes. Like an unjust,narcissistic, selfish,ruthless, culture, that idolizes the greedy rich and tears one another apart to 'get ahead'.A culture that thinks the bigger more powerful and financially secure preying upon the weaker is OK.
Our culture is as sick as those the culture at large look 'up' to. And most people with power and enviable levels of wealth are psychopaths.Hardly a "role model" for sanity is it?

BTW no therapist I ever had could define for me what SANITY is.
They can point out what is wrong with you,why you shouldn't be the way you are.. But they have no model for what sanity might be like that exists without a culture bound or profit motivated(job based & fit in with the normals)kinds of definitions.Since mental illness exists in all cultures,especially I find it interesting it is found more in the more 'advanced' and stressful and alienated 'first world' cultures like ours..I find that rather strange.

[hunter]

20. Don't call this society a "culture." It's a cult.

Your job is to dress up in strange clothes and harass the travelers at the airport for money.

If you can't do that, then the authorities will beat you down.

They'll be no good food, and nobody to sleep with when you come home.

Duh.

[ColbertWatcher]

23. While it is true that there are people who exploit people with illnesses ...

... (like cults for instance), there are people whose medical needs are being ignored. In much the same way that nearly every American's healthcare is being ignored.

[Cetacea]

18. You don't fix software by damaging the hardware. Bring back Opioids.

Opiates remain the gold standard for treating mental illness. Most of the medications being forced on people are mind-altering and brain-altering and physically dangerous. And they pretty much don't work. (that is why people have to keep taking them)

There is a huge socio/economic connection to mental illness that was being explored in the 1970's before Big Pharma took over.
People are given drugs whose possible side effects include the very symptoms they are fighting...

Opioids are the answer. They are safer and much cheaper (oh ohh). Who gives a rats ass if they are medically addicting when most people are told that they will have to take most of those god-awful drugs for the rest of their lives anyway?

Link:http://www.drugbuyers.com/freeboard/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/196682/site_id/1#import

More importantly, read the personal experiences

[undergroundpanther]

19. Stress gets people addicted to opioids

Stress can lead to opioid abuse

Heroin and morphine inhibit the stress hormone cycle and presumably the release of stress-related neurotransmitters just as the natural opioid peptides do. Thus, when people take heroin or morphine, the drugs add to the inhibition already being provided by the opioid peptides. This may be a major reason that some people start taking heroin or morphine in the first place, suggests Dr. Kreek. "Every one of us has things in life that really bother us," she says. "Most people are able to cope with these hassles, but some people find it very difficult to do so. In trying opiate drugs for the first time, some people who have difficulty coping with stressful emotions might find that these drugs blunt those emotions, an effect that they might find rewarding. This could be a major factor in their continued use of these drugs."
http://www.nida.nih.gov/NIDA_Notes/NNVol14N1/Stress.html

I think underneath "mental illness" is some form of emotional stress, or stress caused by abuse.And rape ,child abuse,spouse abuse and workplace/school abuse is a shockingly common thing in our country.
So that could be one reason mental illness is so common,because that many people are dealing with abuse and stress they cannot handle.Mental illness used to be called a "nervous breakdown".

[hunter]

21. Don't mind me, I'm in the bathroom puking while my intestines stagnate in a burning bloat of shit.

Ugh. Opioids. I can have a bloody root canal or break a bone and wonder which is worse: the pain or the vicodin. I usually settle for the least miserable combination of both.

People take that stuff for fun???

But yeah, too many doctors under-prescribe effective pain killers because they subscribe to the old discredited bite on a stick and tough it out so you don't become an addict theory of pain relief.