Meds Drive Autistic Boy Over the Edge into Insanity

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As far as psychology goes, I favor aspects of it such as cognitive neuroscience, if any. And there are a few things worth salvaging there.

But as far as applied psychology, what I meant was those psychoanalytic beginnings (and other things going on around that time period)... that's back when the categories still used today were more or less solidified. There's been slight tweaking since then but not much.

What are the chances that they actually understood categories of human beings so well with such bad theories of how we worked? For instance, what are the chances that all kinds of schizophrenia are connected, when we already know that the theory that, for instance, Bleuler and company came up with, as to why "schizophrenia" was "schizophrenia", was wrong for most people in that category (which for awhile included autistic people as well)? I just don't see that as very likely.

And all I really see in psychiatry, is solidified nonsense from back then. As well as constant "advances" in "treatments" that are then shown to be utterly barbaric, and then a "new treatment" comes along that is supposed to be less barbaric but it turns out to be equally so. As far as drugs, you can't really argue more than one category and usage at a time, but many of them simply don't turn out to do what they're purported to do. Additionally, many of the things they claim about neurotransmitters are not supported by evidence. (They'll claim depression is a "chemical imbalance" just because SSRIs sometimes seem to correct it, which is a very strange thing to me, because when I take my anti-seizure drugs, they don't tell me I have an imbalance of the chemicals they work on. There's also a lot of stuff where they don't seem to know cause from effect, but will happily tell you things based on cause and effect anyway.)

For instance, neuroleptics have been used on people with developmental disabilities to "control behavior" for at least half a century now, and there's now studies coming out saying they don't actually do that. Many of the purported uses of that class of drugs in particular, come from the fact that they were used to keep people quiet during a certain period of time. Then, somehow, magically, they morphed into "treating the conditions" that the people in institutions had who were being kept quiet by the drugs. I also remember in my life and the lives of many others a fair amount of duress going on as far as reporting improvement, and even reporting "symptoms" in the first place. (Given the conditions many of us were living in, we'd report whatever we thought we were expected to report, and that's not uncommon in the psych system.)

Additionally, psychology has all the scientific evidence necessary to show that the setup of so-called psychiatric "hospitals" is guaranteed to result in a large number of abuses that are not controllable merely by putting "good people" in there. However, despite that evidence existing, they continue to do exactly that. Within such a system, no matter what anyone believes their own motivations to be, you can't trust the results that come out of other things, because among other things the population of people who happen to live in it are often not in a state to give accurate and objective information about what's going on.

(Before anyone jumps on me, I'm not talking about their brain not being capable of it, I'm talking about the forces an institution puts on its "patients" making it in a person's best interests to say and do what those in power want to hear and see. And I know that to be accurate not just because of the science but because of the enormous amount of ex-patients I know. Many of us had the experience of being locked in small rooms until we "admitted" we were sick and needed help, and to whatever symptoms anyone told us to admit to. People either on the other side of this or distanced enough from it not to know what goes on there, will tell you there's safeguards in place to protect people against this. Ha ha.)

I think I already mentioned that some people working there really believe it's in your best interests, but they're also in a system that thinks that they're dealing with diseases when they're dealing with something far more complex than that involving assorted collisions of sociology and neurotype and cognition (which they claim to believe in, but tend to either focus entirely on cognition or entirely on neurotype); that thinks that what's essentially a taxonomy come up with a century or more ago with crappy explanations for the divisions, is still valid today; and that thinks that the drugs all match the 'diseases' in a particular way that's already been laid out for them.

It's also likely true (and I've seen it mentioned in the work of Dick Sobsey, an educational psychologist who's studied the reasons for abuse of disabled people in general) that many sociopaths find a haven working in that and similar professions because of the things they can get away with in those settings. (I would never say most people, but I think I've met a small number.)

Add to that that even people with good intentions get sucked into the power dynamics of the system unless they really keep their bearings, and it's a pretty hostile place where (as a "patient" or a parent of a "patient") being manipulated is the norm, you're not being given good information, and things are actively hostile towards you even if a few individual people are not. (I've had one good psychiatrist. And there was usually one or two staff in any given place who were alright. Everyone else were either some pretty scary people, or good people who'd lost their bearings and been turned scary by a scary system.)

When I say "pretty scary people", by the way, just so there's no confusion here, I'm not talking about people trying to do the right thing and screwing up, I'm talking about people who watched my airway closing, noted this fact, laughed, insulted me, and walked off, such that if some particular circumstances involving other people finding me weren't right I wouldn't be here telling you this. I'm not trying to shock people but I'm just trying to make clear I'm not talking about a situation where there's the slightest room for the purported "misunderstandings" that everyone claims these things are when they happen to us. (I've seen reports of situations identical to mine except for the person intervening. In those situations, the "patient" died. Usually nobody is prosecuted.)

So, no, in a system that works like that, I cannot fully believe the results of studies that are done, because too many basic starting assumptions are wrong, too many environments contain possible major skewing of the results in several different directions, and too many studies have shown similar environments to be detrimental to the results. Basically, I know and have studied more about the history of psychology and psychiatry than most people, and there's too little believable about it for most of it to be considered a true branch of science or medicine as it is now. You talk about those things from a hundred years ago being gone... actually what worries me is how much of that taxonomy from back then is nearly identical. You'd think we'd have learned a bit more since then.

Basically, there are real and serious and scientific criticisms of clinical psychiatry at the moment, and they're not the same as criticizing the entire medical establishment just because it exists. Most of the research into autism, just to give an example, is completely shoddy. It's crap. The evidence doesn't support the conclusions. People will give tie-ins to autism, like little shout-outs for popularity, on studies that haven't the slightest thing to do with autism.

And a lot of the reason for this is that psychiatry is the field that gets to study it. And psychiatry is sort of like science for people who'd rather be creative writers, because if you don't get evidence for something you can make stuff up. The rest of psychiatry, the parts not dealing with autism, isn't that much better. You can get away with a lot. There are higher standards in most other areas of medicine even if they would still be dealing with autism in a purely medical way. And the rest of psychiatric research into "abnormal" psychiatry is just about as dismal if not worse. (Housecats causing schizophrenia!?!?)

(This is not to say there are no branches of psychology that are scientific, but I think those parts ought to detach themselves from the rest of psychiatry at the earliest opportunity and never look back.)

By the way, it was a psychiatrist hired by the insurance company, who never met me, who threatened my parents all the time, and put the threat out there for everyone else to see and work with, that I would not be their child anymore technically, if they kept advocating for me. I don't see any good intentions there at all. It was just the exact thing my psychiatrist had feared (the thing that made him diagnose me as PDD-NOS even though I fit the criteria for autism), which was that insurance would not want to actually fund anything useful for me, and would instead want to permanently and cheaply get me away from my parents (whose insurance it was) and have me locked up indefinitely past then. Some people had good intentions, but it was not that guy. Give the "good intentions" award to the guy who was fighting him, instead. He deserved it, even if he didn't entirely know what he was doing in his attempts to do so.

I am the author of Psych Meds and have appreciated the discussion it generated. Now, I have a question, for those of you who've been there: While on antipsychotics, my son slept 12-18 hours per day. We've gotten him off the meds and "detoxed" and his sleep is down to 10-12 hours, but he is IMPOSSIBLE to awaken in the morning. We battle every day for an hour or two just to get him on his school bus at 9:30. . . .Any ideas? Strategies that have worked? Dietary, vitamin, behavioral interventions I might try?

I wish I knew.

I am currently experiencing something like that while on a combination of legitimate meds (they treat both pain and seizures). I'm impossible to wake up by noise, and given that nobody around here's related to me, nobody's dared to try any physical methods, let alone the sort of methods my dad used to use on my brother. (Sticking ice cubes down his shirt, etc.)

The only thing I can think of, is trying to get to bed earlier, so that the 10 to 12 hours stops at whatever time he's got to get up. Otherwise, it might help to consult with a sleep disorders specialist. (Just, with your previous experiences, try to get one that won't try to make you drug him.)

And I would warn that before doing all those things, be aware that believing in them to that extent, can be just as damaging and dangerous as believing that psychiatric medications are all the answers. I would say that one of the number one things, is never let anyone tell you that anything, be it the trends in traditional medicine, or the trends in alternative medicine, is The Answer in capital letters.

Going on strict "alternative" diets such as the raw food diet can be very tempting to someone with obsessive tendencies the way an autistic person often has. (I know this from my own experiences.) Read all the articles hosted at and linked to by the Orthorexia Home Page (that's a link) before you get into them. The original article on orthorexia (that's another link) goes into more detail about what this is. This website (another link) also has a number of articles about the effects of orthorexia, which basically turns diet and other things like that into a substitute for moral, health-related, or spiritual development.

Going to a completely "natural" way of life (and it's unclear to me why the technology of a parrot or beaver is "natural" and the technology of a human is not) can lead to an obsession with purity, which can become evangelical in its own right, and which can cause a person to look down their nose at other people who are not as "natural", especially if they continue to have health problems (which you can then blame on them not having the right lifestyle). Which translates into self-righteously blaming people for their own health conditions, and turning the same blame on yourself when your health continues to be a problem. You must not have been pure enough. Some tiny bit of impurity must have crept into your life. Leading to more need for vigilance. Etc. It can turn into its own form of paranoia (I don't know another word for it, sorry for the psych term) that cuts you off from the rest of the world, or at least the rest of the world that doesn't have exactly the beliefs you have come to have.

My best advice is try whatever comes to mind and see what works. But never let anyone convert you at a time when you are vulnerable, even if their intentions are all the best (and if they are an alternative practitioner, their intentions might even be to get a lot of money from you). When I was a teenager and experiencing a major period of burnout (plus the onset of a movement disorder) that led to a very similar situation with psych drugs, we first turned to psychiatry because they were supposed to have the answers. They of course didn't, and they did a lot of things that very much damaged me. And the first stop for those of us who are damaged or ignored by any aspect of the health care system is the many, many schools of "alternative" and "natural" thought out there. Which is where we ended up next. We ended up learning the hard way that they were just as bad if not worse than ordinary doctors.

These days, I do whatever seems to work. If it's conventional medicine, I use it, and it has saved my life. If it's an herbal treatment, and it works better than conventional treatments, I use it, and that has saved my life too at times. My doctor is a really good doctor, very highly respected by any other medical professional that knows him, and open to anything that works, but his mind is not so open his brains fall out either. There's a balance to be struck there and he does it well. Because I have chronic physical health problems that don't go away with "living natural", some amount of long-term treatment is a necessity to keep me alive. I've taken an herbal drug (and always keep in mind herbal drugs are drugs, with side-effects, sometimes better and sometimes worse than the equivalent conventional drugs) that's a mild anti-convulsant, for instance, but it's not effective enough to control my seizures on its own.

Which makes me the sort of person that many "alternative" people look down their nose at and claim that if I was just pure enough my health problems would not exist. Which is basically a form of ableism, and strikes me as very similar to the attitude that used to be far more prevalent, that said that those of us who were not healthy and non-disabled were obviously sinners being punished for our sins. While I don't deny that I'm a sinner (and who isn't?), I don't think I've done anything so heinous that something like, say, trigeminal neuralgia, is an appropriate punishment. (And, yes, the pain from that is bad enough that having part of my nerves temporarily destroyed was not at all too high a price to pay. Just as, while I think Prednisone is a horrible drug, I was very glad to have it during an asthma flare-up.)

But basically, what I'm saying, is be really really careful after your experiences with psychiatry. Don't let something else take you in and tell you they're the whole answer, because they're most likely no more so than psychiatry was. And there are many things that there is no good solution for in either conventional or alternative medicine. Don't let yourself get roped into anything else just because one thing was a disaster. That's what I had to learn after, for instance, neuroleptics made my own movement disorder (variously described as catatonic or parkinson-like) far worse.

Also, I forgot to ask, is the problem waking up, or is the problem with moving in the morning? Because what I've found useful for movement itself is a combination of the following (which all have some evidence behind them, although I don't really think of them as medical as much as I think of them as adaptations):

1. Not being too overloaded with information (this can be both immediate and cumulative). The more things I have to deal with, the less likely it is I'll have leftover brain for either finding or moving my body. Past a certain point, there has been no way I could handle school.

2. Reducing things like pain. For awhile I didn't know how much pain I was in. This post on my blog (that's a link) goes into what happened at that point. I also had neuropathic pain (similar to central pain) all over my body, which responds well to things such as Neurontin, Lyrica, and Trileptal. But the first few weeks of any of those drugs, they do a real number on my brain (as in, destroy my sense of time so that I sit staring for hours not realizing I'm doing so). So be really careful with them if he does turn out to have that kind of pain.

3. Having assistance with the movement itself. This can take the form of:

A. Someone doing what I need to do and allowing me to mirror it.

B. A lack of visual or other cues that make it difficult to move. For instance, lacking lines I have to cross. (They are now even starting to make some goggles that people with Parkinson's can use. They deliver the visual cues that make movement easier, thereby allowing people to walk instead of freeze.) Clutter in my environment makes moving very difficult, a very neat environment that points me towards things I can do and away from things I shouldn't do makes it easier.

C. Someone touching the joint I need to bend, so that I can find it.

D. Someone physically supporting the body part I need to move, if my body is rigidly pushing in one direction this can help stabilize it and help me move in other directions as well.

E. Someone tapping me to remind me where various body parts are and trigger movement.

F. Sometimes, if I am pressing the other direction whenever someone pushes on me, then there can be an effect like that of a snapping lid on those ones that have the catch where you push down and the lid pops up. So if someone knows what I'm trying to do, they can push backwards and then suddenly let up the pressure (while still touching me) and I will suddenly go in that direction.

G. Guiding me in a particular direction.

H. Cuing verbally or physically.

Etc. There are lots and lots of strategies to assist with movement, if that's the problem at all. I'd recommend the book Movement Differences and Diversity in Autism/Mental Retardation (which gets into catatonia among other things) for more information, if Anna didn't already recommend it to you. It's a small but excellent book. This article here (another link) describes some things from that book but does not go into detail.

I hope any of that has been useful. And, again, take whatever works from any philosophy, but try not to become fanatical about anything, it can make you lose sight of whether something is working or not.

I read you whole story WOW. Never knew about it. I almost killed my self cause the doc gave me the wrong drug. At the time is was seeing him I knew by asking other clients that they all were getting the same drugs. All of them! I thought it was odd at the time. And just thought well hes the Doc. I fired him. But befor that ,I'm luck it get off the med cause my inssureance ran out and wouldn't pay. Good thing. After that it was like I just woke up and my self came back. I think I'm going to reporte my suspicious thoughts about him. It was nuerontin some thing like that that made me stand or sit in one postion for hours. and voilent, but odd thing it helped with a pain i had in my lower back that I had for years.Thank you what a great story.

Here's an article that might be useful:

The Early Bird Gets the Bad Grade

This might not help right now, but is there a subject at school that he just loves? If so, scheduling it in early might be the answer, because I know when I had a class I really looked forward to, I was usually easier to get up in the morning.


I have always had problems getting up in the morning. It was so bad during my teen years, that my family would debate on who was going to go wake up the bear.

Even now, I still want to sleep until late morning, but through self-discipline, I get myself up. That and an alarm clock that has annoying chimes that keep getting louder and louder. i can still be a bear, especially if I am sick or very tired.

My best friend in high schools Father had a unique method to getting him up. He would place a large stereo speaker in the entrance to his door and blast Eazy-e into his room. It never failed to get him up, because he would have to get up to turn it off. Not a method that I would recommend.

i'm shocked by this story. what a pill could do to a person, i'm lucky that i stayed clean after the antidepressants i was i given in my young years did nothing more then depress me.

That's what happens, when you drug up a decent kid, with anti psychotics. That mother should have known better.

For a different perspective on raw-foodism:

Idealism Vs. Realism: A comparison

That article goes through, at length, the idealistic claims made by some proponents of raw-foodism (such as that it will cure all known diseases, that nature is always pure and benevolent, etc.), and then the actual realities present in the world (that for some people it might be very healthy, but it won't cure everything, that very few animals in "nature" die of old age, etc). It's from a perspective that accepts some potential benefits from raw-foodism without being dogmatic about it.

Functional and Dysfunctional Lunch Attitudes

That article goes into depth about a number of attitudes towards food (calling them "lunch attitudes").

"Lunch-mindfulness" is the functional attitude mentioned. It means being aware of what you eat, and trying to eat healthily, but not going overboard. Then it goes into a number of dysfunctional lunch attitudes. Lunch-righteousness is the first one mentioned. This means becoming self-righteous about food, putting others down and alienating them, and feeling superior to those who eat a different kind of food. Then there is lunch-identification, where a person's diet becomes so integrated into their sense of self that they are offended by criticism of their diet. As an example, it mentions people lashing out at other people who challenge their idea of The Perfect Natural Diet. It suggests, for that one, the affirmation, "I am more than just my lunch; others are free to choose a different lunch." Lunch-obsession is the thing that can lead to the other dysfunctional attitudes, by thinking excessively about the details of the exact purity of their diet.

The article says that everyone is some combination of function and dysfunctional in these areas, but it's important to try to move more towards functional. It also notes that a lot of people are initially more dysfunctional than functional, because they have just started the diets, they feel better (possibly because of the effect of nutritional deprivation that leads to a feeling of alertness that is supposed to help a person go out and find food, but that is turned into a perception of a "health benefit" instead), and they want to tell everyone about it. Later, as things either go back to normal or to even worse than normal, people become less dogmatic.

The Seduction of Simplistic Raw Vegan Dogma

While this is about raw vegan dogma, a lot of it can be said about raw-food dogma in general too. It discusses what the common dogma is, such as that a raw-food diet is the most "natural" diet in the world, that cooked food is toxic, that a raw-food diet will cure all diseases and lead to perfect health or spiritual perfection, or even that if everyone ate raw food it would lead to world peace. It says that these are basically the "party line", and that when these things are challenged, it can lead to personal attacks. The reason for the article is to make raw foodists (who are not necessarily dogmatic) more aware of how to avoid dogma, and to educate non-raw-foodists about raw foodism's dogma and reality. It even goes into the reasons that people subscribe to the dogma (idealism, gullibility, false sense of security, uniqueness in social settings, a sense of moral superiority over others, etc.)

And those are just some of the articles on the site. There are a lot more, they are not nonsense, and repeating slogans such as "You are what you eat" (does that make raw foodists actually raw vegetables?) and "Garbage in garbage out" (which implies that non-raw food is "garbage" even if people have a good reason for eating it), doesn't change this. These are concerns brought up from within the raw food community about how people can become very caught up and ensnared in a simplistic and idealistic version of diets like this that doesn't match the reality of people who really use these diets long-term.