Dear Brendan,
Arising from your interview with Professor Annie Curtis on November 9th, I would like to raise a few points.
While the interview reflected Annie’s ultimately positive experience in embracing bio-psychiatry with its attendant regime of hospitalisation and mostly drug treatment, I would like to state, from our knowledge of over 20 years of speaking to many people with experience of bio-psychiatry, that it most certainly does not work for them.
These are the people who have taken the drugs and found that they only compounded their emotional distress, especially if they have been prescribed, as is usual, indefinitely. The adverse effects they report, ranging from extreme akathisia or restlessness to tardive dyskinesia or involuntary muscular spasms to sexual dysfunction to excessive weight gain and cognitive impairment, left them all in a zombie-like twilight zone, only living life in a fog. They have been chemically lobotomised.
And then there is the ‘revolving door’ syndrome where admission to the institution is followed by more and more, a further indication that the drugs don’t work. And finally, if after all that, they not surprisingly express a desire not to take them, they can, under the current Mental Health Act, be restrained and forced to accept them. into their bodies,
But no one cares. It is a ‘one size fits all’ system. Pre-election calls for more money in mental health are just for more of the same. There is never any talk of money/resources for alternative methods, no support for doctors willing to help with tapering, no information on the process and no safe communities to facilitate them.
I know you will be going against the established order in the unlikely event you read out this email Brendan but to do so is to give a voice to the reality of the fact that there are thousands of people who didn’t/don’t have the same experience as Professor Curtis.
Yours sincerely,
Jim Maddock.
MindFreedom Ireland.
086 0624445.
wwwmindfreedomireland.com
I have to echo what Jim Maddock has written. I am coming off meds. We do not get any help in tapering. Psychiatry puts people on these toxic drugs for life. Psychiatric patients have no rights. We are the forgotten people. ECT is still being given in our hospials which brings on a grand mal seizure. This is a barbaric practise.