Feeding the Antipsychiatry Frenzy

Posted on October 9, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Crosstalk Psycho-bunk

Check out this article about Rebecca Riley, a four-year old who was found dead of prescription medication overdose:

Such a joy to behold our nation’s lovingkindness babyshakers making headway. And every journalist (cough) netroots blogger who exploits this atrocity (look it up) for their unrelated healthcare political agenda can cancel her out, ignore the inconvenient truth in evidence, and live with that however the hell you live with that, but you don’t get to choose the facts. Facts? What are facts, really, but just more of the same old same old, garden variety fodder for militant antipsychiatry hippies. Facts, distortions, speculations (sigh), if only there was some way to get to the bottom of what went on in that child’s brain house.

Yes, I have heard the “bipolar diagnoses are a fad” refrain on blogs and in the media. Here we have a medium where we can put out the stories that the slanted mainstream ignores and what do we do? Echo the S-ciento-logists and others who don’t have a freaking clue about what mental illness is all about. “It’s really a flaw in character,” we hear over and over again. “Or your engrams are out of whack.” While I believed that, I put myself through a hell resplendent in its purple miseries and self-recriminations. How much easier life has been since I put the focus on managing an illness instead of seeking an evil that might be lurking in me.

Doctors used to ignore bipolar symptoms in the young. It was just their upbringing or maybe a “bad seed”. The guardians of the old beliefs are out to suppress any possibility of innocence due to disease. I believe I hear the voice of the Grand Inquisitor promising to hand out bread if we will forgo the comfort that medication brings. “We must make them rely on us,” I can hear it being said. “Medication is dangerous because it frees them.”