Madness Radio: Sane Medication Policy Robert Whitaker

By MadnessRadio - Posted on 28 March 2009

First Aired: Madness Radio 2009-03-30

Show: Sane Medication Policy Robert Whitaker

Length: 51:25 minutes (47.12 MB)

Format: MP3 Mono 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)

Has society's embrace of psychiatric medications led to recovery -- or chronic disability? What would honest medical policy and treatment standards be if they were free of pharmaceutical company corruption? Pulitzer Prize finalist Robert Whitaker, author of Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill, discusses medications as a failed paradigm of care, and imagines what a sane alternative would look like. www.madinamerica.com.

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Food For Thought
Psychiatric hospital staff likes to stand together and discuss the perception problems of the psychiatrized. They often do this while ‘hiding’ in plain sight behind their ‘masks’ of invisibility.’ The identified ‘schizo’ laughs because it all looks like an absurd joke…and it IS. But the joke is on those who cannot, or will not, see themselves see or hear themselves at all, and because they can’t (or won’t) they cannot see the psychiatrized one either. So they then usually announce from the place of their self deception: “THEY laugh for no reason.”  Upon hearing this, the ‘schizo’ often laughs even more.
 

What is a Closed System?

 Well, university students have repeated back to me that a closed system means ‘there is nothing outside it.’

That is not exactly the case.

It is more like a system that is closed to everyone inside it because they cannot see any way out, even though it is there to see. It’s more like being unaware of any ‘doorway’ because you can only see the ‘doorway’ from OUTSIDE the system. 

My recovery therapist once asked me what the ‘game’ meant; what it was.

I had been talking about playing the ‘game’ on all three levels; with my current protagonist who had been trained to do this by an organization, families who play it as the dysfunctional group ‘game’ and now with psychiatrists who can only hear in terms of the ‘game’ though it is likely that MOST of them don’t know they are playing it.  

I used as an example, “chronic” patients who try to tell the newly labelled who are terrified about what is happening to them and with others, and totally confused by it: “you have to play the game.’

(Some of the newly psychiatrized know what ‘the game’ is and some don’t.)

So I told my therapist:  ‘The ‘game’ is you have to agree with the psychiatrist, you have to go along with the ‘game’ and not fight it, so that they will stop ‘helping’ you.’ The faster you see the ‘error of your ways’, like in ‘blaming others’ who can’t ever be guilty for example, the less unwanted ‘help’ you are likely to get.  It doesn’t matter what really happened to us. The system decides that for us in ten to fifteen cost effective minutes. What the system wants is also what the other protagonists want; COMPLIANCE with their agenda.

It is true that we are trapped in a paradox not matter what we say or do after that, but at least the stress level is reduced, which may, in itself, keep the identified patient from breaking all the way down into psychosis.

So what does this have to do with the ‘message’ from the TV show?

It’s called “Flashpoint” and it’s about hyper-critical situations in which people become trapped for one reason or another and can find no way out.

One of the SWAT team members on the show, while on the way to a hostage situation said it:

“Let’s hope Stockholm Syndrome kicks in.”

Sometimes, all we can do when trapped and controlled by others who have taken (or been given) the power to do so, is try to bond with them as human beings in the hope that they will see us as just like them. If they don’t maybe at least they will feel less inclined to harm us any more than they already have.

As you know, it is already understood that many abused children will run to the parent who is doing the abusing and often display the most affection for their abuser. It is because it may be the only hope of control over their own fate which they have going for them.  Of course, outsiders and onlookers don’t usually understand that do they?  

It is unfortunately, part of the abusers twisted thinking to believe that this result “proves’ his abuse is a ‘good’ thing and not ‘really’ abuse at all...

Metaphysical illusions make some powerful magic.