Meds Drive Autistic Boy Over the Edge into Insanity

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I don't have permanent dystonia, I have a permanent movement disorder that already existed and was made worse by artificially depleting dopamine (which anyone with even a tiny bit of knowledge in that field understands the mechanism of). Everyone I know with the same movement disorder had the same reaction to neuroleptics of any kind. We react stronger than usual and the reactions are more severe than usual. It's like giving an SSRI to someone who already has serotonin syndrome, there's no way to paint it as a useful thing.

Last edited by anbuend on 08 Jan 2008, 2:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Which is entirely moot in this case. However it does bring to mind another case of copyright infringement about a guy arrested for downloading music to his computer. Think I'll go post that one.

The mother should have taken her son off the pills.

Parents aren't informed of these things. There are also a number of scare tactics used.

My parents were told:

1. That I wouldn't have any chance of an independent life without whatever pills were being prescribed.

2. That I could be taken away from them, made into a ward of the state, and permanently institutionalized, if they didn't sign a form to force me to take these pills (at which point it would be considered that I might be moved to a lower-security institution to possibly prepare me for living outside one maybe years later.)

3. That clear side-effects of the drugs were actually signs of whatever additional "brain disease" they had me diagnosed with at that point in time, and that they didn't know anything because after all they were not professionals.

And... basically a whole lot of scare tactics designed to make them believe that they were bad, negligent parents, and even to treat them as such, if I was not drugged in one form or another.

There's no such thing as a "Here, your kid is in the psych system now, here's how to see through their BS" manual, and even if there were, it's not like the psych system hands them out. As my mom put it, they didn't have the education, knowledge, or brains at that time in their lives to put together the knowledge of what was going wrong. And the one time they did fight the system to get me out of one place, the system won, and was threatening to win even more.

Well I'm pro-doctor and pro-med, soooooo I think I'll go play in another sandbox. I'm getting the impression that would be the preferred course here....

I understand people have had bad experiences. So have I. I also believe mood disorders are a result of atypical brain chemistry, and that it needs to be treated by drugs, if it interferes with life, or if the underlying condition creates a danger to the person or to others. My number one job as a parent is to keep my children safe. That also means from themselves. I have every expectation that as they grow older, the need for those medications will be reduced, eventually to zero in most cases. I've learned to cope, so has my wife. So will they.

The whole article - http://www.psychiatricrights.org/Storie ... nCrazy.htm

I take a lot of medications. I think it's incredibly dangerous to give neuroleptics to people with parkinson-like movement disorders including catatonia. I fail to see the contradiction.

And I absolutely hate being told that this sort of issue is about "medications". Medications is a category so broad it can mean anything. So is "doctor". I hate being told I'm "anti-medication" for actually answering with... good grief, things that are known to doctors about one very dangerous category of medication. Being told this is about "pro-medication" and "anti-medication" just distorts the issue beyond recognition completely.

It's impossible to carry on a conversation when I'm talking about a specific group of meds being given to a specific group of people -- when I happen to know things like this really did happen to this guy, and I know a wider selection of people with this particular movement disorder than most people do -- and other people are going "Oh, you're anti-meds, so I'm going to argue for meds and for doctors," as if that's even the debate.

Impossible. Completely impossible to hold the conversation. Makes no sense. Does not compute. And I've been hearing the same thing for years whenever I try to bring up a known set of severe and dangerous side-effects of a known class of drugs on a known category of human beings (i.e. autistic people with a particular movement disorder that often accompanies autism).

I also ended up what most people would call curing, a particular thing that most people would call a severe mood disorder, the kind that people "need drugs for" supposedly, etc etc etc. Only I did it without any drugs. Which most people say is impossible, and/or most people will claim I didn't "really" have the same "symptoms" as everyone else did. Only that happens not to be true. And people never want to hear it. (People also don't usually want to hear either (a) that many psych drugs don't do what people think they do or correct what people think they correct, or, in the case of many anti-drug people, that (b) psychotherapy can be more harmful than drugs and the problem with psychiatry isn't drugs it's the power structure and the total lack of scientific base for most things they do.)

I wouldn't blame the mother here - she was just following doctor's *orders* and thought she was helping her son and doing the right thing. After all the FDA approved the drugs. And after all a doctor - no make that NUMEROUS doctors all said it was safe.

You keep speaking the truth anbuend because you never know who you could be helping by telling your story and shedding the light into that chasm of darkness called *modern medicine*.

I'd really like to hear how you cured yourself from a mood disorder btw - when you have the time and if you're so inclined.

This needs to be made into a sticky - people need to be made aware of what actually IS going on with these scare tactics! What amazes me is your clarity and level-headedness - wow. Truly you are a survivor of the madness that's going on.

You can read the full story by clicking the button at the top right of the box that says "Go to *whatever the name was* "


It's such a hard thing to read; the poor family. I'm so glad she found a way to get around it all. To say that the drugs weren't the cause, as some have on here, is ignorance. It doesn't take a rocket scientist.


I can, in my own small way, relate to the experience. I was put on the wrong contraceptive pill last year and slid slowly but surely into an abyss of depression, of darkness, of just... ugh. I would sleep constantly; the moment I sat down my eyes would shut. I would get home from work and sleep. Sleep right after dinner. Sleep in in the mornings. Sleep after I'd woken up. Sleep, sleep, sleep. My entire personality changed; my boyfriend was saying he didn't know how to talk to me anymore as I wasn't myself, but I was helpless. I was depressed and I wanted to die. I cried constantly. My legs were itching, itching... I would wake with enormous scratches in the morning after digging my claws in during the night. I felt as I was in a fog, I couldn't concentrate, I was permanently light-headed - it was like I was drunk or high.

He finally convinced me to change the pill, even before the 3 month 'trial' period was up. I was told it was just 'my body settling into it' and to stop being so 'emotional'; doctor knows best. He dismissed the paper I had from the packet listing every single symptom I had as a side effect.

Thank God I managed to get off it - I seriously doubt I'd be here today.



If that's just the result of the contraceptive pill, I'd hate to think what an antipsychotic could do. There's no doubt in my mind that the boy in this story's madness was caused by the drugs. They may look small and innocent, and you may trust that these people know what they're doing, but sometimes it's just not true.

Scary how much they're receiving for prescribing them too, does that not alarm anyone?!

It did sound a lot like schizophrenia, especially the later parts where he gets really bad. It's easy to see how they could make that mistake.

I have to wonder if I might have ended up in the same position. When I was in fourth grade (prior to my AS diagnosis, which was later the same year) I was prescribed ritalin because my doctor really had no idea what I had. Reading about the side effects, I realize that I seem to have had several, and many resemble autistic behaviors. It was during this period that I became increasingly detatched from reality, stopped caring about the rest of the world, and was highly irritable, sometimes becoming violent when perturbed.

I didn't take it regularly because I didn't feel that it was helping me. In retrospect, this may have caused withdrawal and depression. In any case, I started to become depressed and was prescribed some antidepressant. I don't remember what it was - I think it started with an A - but it was later seen to be insufficient, so I was put on Prozac instead. And after it was prescribed, I cried on the way home. I felt like they were trying to control my feelings and change me into something I wasn't. There was nothing wrong with me; it's just who I was. I stared out the window the whole way home just wishing I could escape.

Each time I was brought back to the doctor for followup, I was asked if it helped, but I really didn't even know. I didn't notice a difference, but it wasn't like I had paid that much attention. I just wanted to get on with life and do the things I wanted to do. I didn't like sitting in the office and being questioned about it. My parents insisted that I was doing much better, but I didn't see it.

I hadn't been taking it consistently anyway, but I finally stopped altogether, with the consent of my doctor, because I really didn't think it was doing me any good.

Things got somewhat better, though depression-like symptoms continue still to this day. However, I'm starting to think it may not be depression at all. On the whole, what looks like depression generally seems to be my response to anxiety: I feel anxious, so I withdraw and stim and just want to be left alone, and sometimes come to tears if I really can't handle it. And if that's what it is, then I can only say that my doctor was a complete f*cktard for not recognizing it.

When I was reevaluated just over the summer, the psychologist/psychiatrist (I don't remember which) could see the anxiety immediately. She didn't have to ask any questions about it. She could tell from my behavior. It was that obvious. And it seems like it just keeps getting worse. It's becoming really hard to handle.

I don't think there's a happy ending here, but I guess it could have been much worse.

Oh that's horrible. I can't begin to imagine. OMG.

These kinds of stories have me thinking about the *research* the pharmaceutical corps do before they're *approved by the FDA*. The animals they test these drugs on must suffer so f*n much at their hands. And if that's not enough, once they are approved - humans have to go through insane side effects that are nothing short of torture. I'm sure on that prescription you have there's a laundry list of side effects nobody should have to go through.

I might go into the depression thing later.

As far as my take on modern medicine, I don't really consider psychiatry a valid branch of medicine, or a science. It's largely an outgrowth of bizarre theories and groupings of people thought up in the psychoanalytic days, then somehow transferred wholesale into super-druggable categories of people, as if somehow all the psychiatric categories in the past were absolutely correct even with no scientific inquiry into them.

(Yet, for instance, they note that catatonic schizophrenia has gotten less and less diagnosis in developed countries. Meanwhile, knowledge about the many neurological movement disorders that look exactly like "catatonic schizophrenia" (which really means "idiopathic catatonia") has increased greatly, as has knowledge of autism (and many autistic children would look like "childhood catatonic schizophrenia" with the full criteria of catatonia in mind, rather than the stereotypes). I have never seen psychiatry put together the correlation there as to why diagnosis has dropped so much and what "catatonic schizophrenia" really means.)

It's also got a particular power structure to it. I have been very bothered that the anti-psychiatry movement seems to have been taken over by psychoanalytic psychiatrists who found their jobs threatened by the biological psychiatry industry. I stayed for somewhere 6 to 9 months at a facility where they were of a heavily psychoanalytic bent, although they used drugs as well. Despite being on measurably-toxic doses of the drugs, the "therapists" were actually worse than the drugging. I don't like something that calls itself anti-psychiatry and is really just anti-biological-psychiatry. (Reminds me of the $cientologists, who are only against psychiatry because it's competition.)

As for drugs, I think anyone with the capacity to choose should be able to put just about anything in their body. However, I don't like the way psychiatry pushes them forcibly on people especially with the scare tactics they use. And I don't like the fact that they're prescribed not on the basis of science but on the basis of sort of someone else's mistake a hundred years ago, compounded on top of itself until it's barely recognizable, and then sold to the public. But it's not the drugs, it's the way they're used. And it's even more than that, the power structure in general of psychiatry, and the fact that they seem to think they know everything about human variance, are able to lock people up without due process (regardless of whether they do the biological stuff or not), etc etc etc. They're just a very strange and scary power structure that ought not to be there.

But I'm not against putting anything in people's bodies they want to, I'm just against people misleading people and coercing and stuff. I also don't think that the entire medical community is responsible for the twisted pseudoscience that is psychiatry, any more than they are for all other branches of pseudoscience that claim to be medical (except inasfar as they validate psychiatry as a "science", which becomes ridiculous when you study its history in depth). Medicine is not infallible of course, and has its problems, but psychiatry is not even medicine.

(With apologies to the people who go into that field sincerely believing that it is, such as my psychiatrist who had problems of his own and then thought he was going to help other people. I really believe in his intentions, because I know him really well by now, but I also think he was badly misled. He was better than any other shrink I got sent to afterwards for any period of time, but where he was better was because of his personality and his own capacities for understanding people and having compassion, not because of the field he ended up working in. Whenever he erred in the direction of the field he worked in rather than other stuff... well it was erring.)

Scary article.

I have seen on these forums where people have mentioned having problems AFTER they had medication prescribed for them.

Read: Lying is bad.

Look, I'm sure the doctors in this situation weren't trying to trick the parents into harming their son. Doctors are no more infallible than the rest of us. Sometimes diagnoses like schizophrenia and ADHD become popular, and the number increases. It's not that the doctors are trying to mislead us. It's just that they're being misled themselves. Given a set of symptoms that could match multiple conditions, a doctor is likely to diagnose the more familiar one.

(The same principle applies to advertising - they don't have to make you like their product, just remember it)

The most important thing is that you do the research and find out as much as you can about the symptoms and related conditions so you can do your best to help your doctor help you. The doctors can't know everything about a person, and you won't necessarily realize that something is important unless you know about the conditions yourself.

The thing is, medicine actually DOES WORK. We KNOW it works because it's been put through trials and found significantly more effective than placebo. If not, it won't be prescribed to you. The thing that's not known is how it will act with different conditions than it was intended for, or whether the benefits will outweigh the risks. That's why they list side-effects and warn you to stop taking it if you have serious problems.

And it's true that there are some silly ideas floating around is psychology, especially in the psychoanalytic school, but it's worth pointing out that you're talking about the very beginnings of psychology, and much of what was learned in the beginning is now known to be seriously flawed. I was always fond of the behaviorist school myself, since that's the only one that's actually scientific, but it seems most professionals are in the pump-you-full-of-drugs school now. Yes, drugs work, but overmedicating is also a problem. You just have to understand the balance of benefits vs risks and decide whether it's worth it.