Corruption in The Mental Health Services

I loath psychiatrists. I have yet to meet a psychiatrist who was smarter than I am. More than this, though, the mendacity and bogusness of the psychiatric profession makes me deeply angry and frustrated. Many of the people who work in the Mental Health Service are good people, true, but the whole edifice is built on a lie, on bad science, and consequently fraudulence and hypocrisy are rife within the psychiatric community. In this post, I want to give some examples from my own life that demonstrate this.

In 2007, as I have discussed in earlier posts, I suffered a psychotic episode as the result of a brief period volunteering at a student radio station. I was admitted into the Mental Health Service as a voluntary patient and put on 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone daily. I did not want to take medication at all but felt I had no choice. I was terribly paranoid. My first psychotic episode lasted the rest of 2007, about six months. In 2008, I was, more or less, well. I never stopped taking the medication during this period – I believed that I was only on it temporarily and I truly thought that at some point someone would allow me to stop taking it. I went back to university again and studied some papers in philosophy. Around December 2008, I became psychotic again - indeed for the first time I started hearing voices. (For a description of my first experience hearing voices, see "Me and Jon Stewart".) Despite my illness, I went to another university to study Computer Programming. Although I was hearing voices all the time and was dealing with terrible paranoia, I found I was quite capable of writing computer code. After all, I didn't have to interact with other people. Around August 2009, my psychotic symptoms having become unendurable, I finally convinced my psychiatrist to allow me to discontinue the Rispiridone by threatening to kill myself. He panicked and allowed me to reduce it by 0.5 mgs a week over about a month and a half. During this time I became concerned that the drug had affected my testosterone levels; I was referred to an endocrinologist. My belief that my testosterone had been affected was, I recognize now, a delusion born of psychosis. After I succeeded in getting completely off the Rispiridone, I was well for about a month - and then, quite suddenly, became ill once more. (Again for a fuller picture, see "Me and Jon Stewart"). I still hadn't successfully escaped the system and the distress of the previous nine months had proved traumatic. Towards the end of the year, I agreed to start taking a different drug, Olanzapine.

This is not what has been set down in official records about me. In early 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act and I was the subject of a Judicial Hearing. It was said in the report about me used at this hearing that my worst period of illness was 2008 and that I had frequently discontinued my medication during this year. This is bullshit. It was also said that I had been well in 2009 and had discontinued the Rispiridone because of "side effects" - there was no mention of suicidality at all. Presumably my psychiatrist , Tony Fernando, didn't want it made public that his misdiagnosis of my condition had nearly driven to kill myself. At this first Judicial Hearing, in 2014, I told the Judge that I was most ill in 2009. He said, in some surprise, "Not 2008?". I said, "No, 2009". I am not entirely sure why this significant error in my medical history was put forward to the judge. 

After starting to take Olanzapine, I was on 10 mgs for a little over the next two years. (Appropriate dosages vary from drug to drug.)  I recovered from my psychosis in the early part of 2010. On the first of February, 2012 (a couple of days after the Laneway Festival) I had my last appointment with Tony Fernando. I  had asked to be discharged from the service. At this time, I asked if I could reduce my medication from 10mgs to 7.5mgs and was allowed to. Because I felt so well, I took it upon myself to reduce my medication to 5mgs. During this year, 2012, I completed a Masters of Creative Writing at AUT University. During this year, I was almost completely free of psychotic symptoms. Early in 2013, I asked my GP if I could reduce from 5mgs to 2.5mgs. She suggested I alternate between 5 and 2.5. A little later in the year, before Easter, I again started to experience a psychotic episode. I believe that this episode was the result of the fact that I hadn't made sense of my own life and my mistreatment by the Mental Health System. I became a voluntary patient of the psychiatrists again, this time asking to see any doctor apart from Tony Fernando. During this year, the psychiatrists tried to convince me to increase the dosage from 5 back to 10mgs but, because I no longer believed in the efficacy of antipsychotic medication, I refused. In the early part of 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act and started receiving Compulsory Treatment.

Again this is plainly not what was said about me in my records. At my most recent Mental Health review it was said that my dosage was increased from 10 to 12.5mgs in early 2010. This is a complete lie. Furthermore it was said that I had been on 12.5 mgs right up until 2013 and had decreased my dosage from 12.5mgs to 2.5 mgs without consulting anyone. All this is also total bullshit. I was on 5 mgs for almost all of 2012 and 2013. Why would I reduce from 12.5 mgs to 2.5 mgs all at once? Even when I was experiencing psychosis, I was never that irrational. In fact, up until the end of 2013, I always took the dosage of the drug that had been deemed appropriate by either psychiatrist or General Practitioner.

The only explanation I can find for all this, for these significant errors in what has been reported about me with respect to medication, is that I have been the victim of a coverup to protect my first psychiatrist, Tony Fernando, from charges of something amounting to criminal malpractice.

This description of my life, particularly with its focus on medication, may seem involved and hard to understand. The point is that psychiatrists and the general community subscribe to a simple maxim: "Take your drugs and you're well; stop taking them and you'll get sick". This is all bullshit.  The whole system is founded on a fiction and people are willing to lie to protect this fiction. The truth is that antipsychotics only work if the patient believes they work. Antipsychotics are a placebo. More than this, I believe that antipsychotics can actually prevent people from truly recovering. This may seem an extraordinary claim but in a future post I shall try to back it up.

I believe that the corruption of the Mental Health System runs deeper, in my case, than just falsehoods told about how much medication I was taking. I believe I have been misrepresented in other ways as well but I have little direct evidence of this. There is a good deal of what is effectively institutional sadism in the psychiatric community and I strongly suspect a lot my suffering can be laid at the door of my first psychiatrist Tony Fernando. I once wrote a letter to the newspaper describing him as a sociopath; in my world, a sociopath is someone with no respect for the truth and I believe this is a fair description of this man.

I feel I should say again that there are many well meaning people in the Mental Health Service but so long as people continue to subscribe to theories of psychosis that are bogus, mistreatment will continue.

For other posts on this subject, I recommend "Why I Hate 'A Beautiful Mind'" and "The Reverse Placebo Effect".