Alternatives and Solutions

Overview

Through stigmatising labels, unscientific diagnoses, easy seizure and commitment laws and brutal, depersonalising treatments, millions around the world fall into psychiatry’s coercive system each year. It is a system that epitomizes human rights abuse.

Too many individuals and their governments assume that psychiatrists understand and practice mental healing. The reality is that what psychiatrists do bears no resemblance to help.

Basic Criteria for Real Mental Health

Consider the following basic criteria for the creation of real mental health:

Effective mental healing technology and treatments which improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society, by restoring individuals to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual wellbeing.

Highly trained, ethical practicioners who are committed primarily to their patient’s and their patient’s family’s well-being and who can and do deliver what they promise.

Mental healing delivered in a calm atmosphere characterised by tolerance, safety, security and respect for people’s rights.

An involuntary patient has fewer rights and less legal protection than a common criminal, even though he or she has usually broken no laws. Every minute another person is forced into a psychiatric facility to undergo brutal and unworkable treatment they do not want. Psychiatrists order parents to put their children on a mind-altering drug which constitutes child abuse. One-year-olds are now being prescribed psychiatric drugs. Six-year-olds have been restrained and killed in institutions without any criminal culpability. Electroshock assaults women and kills the elderly. Psychiatric patients are made submissive and emotionless - no joys, no sorrows, just obedient and manageable.

Do No Harm

The first option is not an option but a standing rule: Do no harm. That means not subjecting any person to brutal psychiatric treatments. These “treatments” are designed to control the individual, their behavior and their unwanted emotions, not to cure anything. And force is often used to accomplish this, in the form of harmful psychotropic drugs and other destructive practices. The result is physical and mental damage to the individual who is then less able to deal with the situations he sought to solve, and the situation worsens.

Most mental difficulties are caused by underlying physical illness which should be addressed with medical, not psychiatric, treatment. Article 3 of CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights states that all persons should have “the right to a thorough physical and clinical examination by a competent registered general practitioner of one’s choice, to ensure that one’s mental condition is not caused by any undetected and untreated physical illness, injury or defect, and the right to seek a second medical opinion of one’s choice.”

Focus on Workability

Because most psychiatric treatment includes the prescribing of psychotropic drugs, and non-drug options are rarely offered to patients, true informed consent is rare. Alternative options are buried by the marketing hype that “mental illness” is the result of some neurobiological dysfunction or chemical imbalance that can only be corrected with psychotropic drugs. There is no scientific merit to these claims, but they support drug sales of more than $27 billion a year in the United States and $80 billion worldwide.

How to Help Someone Manifesting “Psychiatric” Symptoms

No one denies that people have problems in their lives and that they can become mentally unstable, even psychotic. However mental healing methods should result in recovered individuals.

And workable healing methods do exist.

The first action to undertake with someone manifesting “psychiatric” symptoms is a full and searching medical examination.

Dr Sydney Walker III, a neurologist and psychiatrist wrote: “The moral is that very little is undiagnosable, but much is not being diagnosed.”

The California Department of Mental Health Medical Evaluation Field Manual - which the Citizens Commission on Human Rights assisted in introducing - states: “Mental health professionals working within a mental health system have a professional and a legal obligation to recognize the presence of physical disease in their patients ... Physical diseases may cause a patient’s mental disorder [or] may worsen a mental disorder ...”

Real Medical Problems can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Mental Disorders

Real medical problems can produce symptoms which psychiatrists label as invented mental disorders such as ADHD, Depression, Bipolar Disorder or Schizophrenia.

There are many real and treatable medical, nutritional and dietary conditions that can produce such symptoms. The following is a small sample to illustrate this fact:

Food Additive Sensitivity
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as ADHD.
Fast Food Diet
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as ADHD.
Vitamin B Deficiency
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Depression.
Vitamin D Deficiency
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Depression.
Chromium Deficiency
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Depression.
Under-active thyroid (Hypothyroidism)
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Depression.
Omega-3 Deficiency
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Bipolar Disorder.
Thyroid Imbalance
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Bipolar Disorder.
Folic Acid Deficiency
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Schizophrenia.
Heavy Metal Toxicity
can produce symptoms psychiatrists label as Schizophrenia.

There are many many more examples that could be added to the above list.

For this reason and as stated before, the first action to undertake with someone manifesting “psychiatric” symptoms is a full and searching medical examination.

Real Help without Drugs

Dr Giorgio Antonucci proved that communication, not enforced incarceration and inhumane physical treatments, can heal even the most seriously disturbed mind. In the Institute of Osservanza (Observance) in Imola, Italy, Dr Antonucci treated dozens of “schizophrenic” women who had been strapped to their beds or kept in straightjackets for years. He released the women from their confinement, addressed their untreated medical conditions and spent many hours each day talking with them. Within a few months, his “dangerous” patients were walking quietly in the asylum garden. Eventually they were discharged and many were taught how to work and care for themselves for the first time in their lives.

Soteria House

In the 1970s, Dr. Loren Mosher, director of the Centre for Schizophrenia Studies at the US National Institute of Mental Health developed the Soteria Project, designed to treat patients with “love and food and understanding, not drugs”. Without drugs, patients worked at significantly higher occupational levels, were able to live independently or with peers, and had fewer hospital readmissions. Said one young man: “If it wasn’t for this place, I don’t know where I’d be right now ... Soteria saved me from a fate worse than death”. However, such success was a direct threat to American institutional psychiatry. The National Institute of Mental Health condemned the study and cut the project’s funding, forcing its closure and the end of its effective drug-free therapy.

Alternatives to Psychiatry exist and are in use

Psychiatrist Joseph Glenmullen says, most people can overcome the obstacles of leading satisfying lifestyles through the help of more natural alternatives that treat our whole selves, including physical, intellectual, and emotional.

Meanwhile, Dr Thomas Szasz says that the mentally disturbed do not need mental hospitals; they need asylums places of refuge where they would be protected from coercion by persecutors posing as protectors.

Thankfully, there are many non-psychiatric and workable ideas and practices in the quest for the achievement and recovery of mental health, even for the most severely disturbed individuals. While psychiatry is the last to promote it, a great deal of knowledge is skillfully applied by many non-psychiatric professionals. A great deal of help is being given.

The Way Forward

Ban electroshock therapy labelling it a human rights abuse.
Ban psychosurgery labelling it a human rights abuse.
Anyone with a physical or mental condition should first see a competent, non-psychiatric physician to ensure that an undiagnosed, untreated, physical condition is not causing “psychiatric” symptoms.
Install a full complement of diagnostic equipment in psychiatric facilities to locate underlying and undiagnosed physical conditions.
Promote the use of the many non-psychiatric and workable ideas and practices that can bring about the recovery of mental health, even for the most severely disturbed individuals.
Help those currently on psychiatric drugs to come off safely under the direction of competent, non-psychiatric physicians.

Adopt the following code of conduct for the mental health industry:

Use only effective mental healing technology and treatments which improve and strengthen individuals and thereby society, by restoring individuals to personal strength, ability, competence, confidence, stability, responsibility and spiritual well-being.
Employ only highly trained, ethical practitioners who are committed primarily to their patient’s and their patient’s family’s well-being and who can and do deliver what they promise.
Deliver mental healing in a calm atmosphere characterised by tolerance, safety, security and respect for people’s rights.

Organisations that Can Help

For organisations that can help with non-psychiatric solutions and alternatives, please click here

For More Information

For more information on Solutions and Alternatives, please click here.
For more information on medical causes of Schizophrenia, please click on the image below:

Disclaimer: Please note that the information on this website is for information purposes only.
None of it constitutes medical advice. In order to safely come off psychiatric drugs, we have provided relevant websites in on our Links page. However we provide this information on a buyer-beware basis and you must use your own judgement. No one should stop taking any psychiatric drug without the advice and assistance of a competent, non-psychiatric medical doctor.