Patients Over Power

Advocating for the human rights of patients in Ireland’s mental health care system #HumanRights 🇮🇪 #EndCoercion #MentalHealthAdvocacy #ReformPsychiatry

[Patients Over Power @Patients_Power]

My petition is finally live! Sign with your support for real, ethical mental health rights for the people of Ireland #MentalHealthBill2024 #HumanRights #Ireland

https://t.co/PuMb40GWBq

[Fiona French, freedom is bliss @benzosarebad]

Criticisms of psychiatry come from a range of people, including some psychiatrists and many patients, and indicates a real and pressing problem. The fact there is a survivor movement is not something we see with other branches of medicine.

[Dr Joanna Moncrieff @joannamoncrieff]

On how critical psychiatry has failed to change the brain-bias of mainstream psychiatry. Despite the supposed biopsychosocial approach, 'The message patients tend to hear.. is that a psychiatric diagnosis means there is something wrong with their brain'

[Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin]

I am a board-certified clinical psychologist with over 20 years in this field.

I have the letters after my name. The license on the wall. I sat through the graduate seminars, completed the internship hours, passed the exams, read the research, contributed to the research.

I am, by every measure the industry recognizes, one of its own.

And I think the whole thing is absurd.

Not the suffering. The suffering is real.
Not the desire to help. That's genuine.

The system we built around it is the joke.

A human being walks into a beige room. They may be carrying grief. Trauma. Spiritual disconnection. The weight of things they cannot name and have never been given permission to speak.

Whatever they're carrying, the system has the same answer.

Forty-five minutes. On a Tuesday. At 2:30pm.

Who decided this? Was there a study? A summit? A breakthrough in neuroscience that revealed the soul opens and closes on a billable schedule?

Of course not.

The 45-minute hour exists because it lets a therapist see enough clients in a day to make their student loan payment.

And here's where it gets cruel.

Let's say something extraordinary happens in session. The thing you buried at age seven surfaces. Your body starts shaking. Tears are coming from somewhere ancient. This is healing happening in real time.

Your therapist glances at the clock.

"We're going to have to stop here."

So they teach you a grounding technique. You name five things you can see, four things you can touch, and one reason you thought this was going to be different. You shove all that energy back into your body where it will stay, compressed and unresolved, until next Tuesday at 2:30.

Then you walk to the front desk and swipe your card while your hands are still trembling.

This is what we call the therapeutic process.

The system needs you to stay in it. A therapist who heals their clients has no clients. A therapist with no clients can't pay rent.

So the industry created its masterpiece: the professional patient. Twelve years in therapy. Fluent in attachment styles, trauma responses, inner child language. No better. Maybe worse. But committed to the process. And the process is committed to their credit card.

The more therapy language you learn, the more you see yourself through the lens of pathology. Every bad day becomes a depressive episode. Every argument, a trauma response. Every moment of self-doubt, your anxious attachment.

You've been handed an entire vocabulary for your own dysfunction. It never occurs to you that the vocabulary itself might be the cage.

And when the talking doesn't work? Drugs. You'll see a prescriber for 15 minutes. They'll ask how you're sleeping. You'll say badly. They'll prescribe something that flattens your emotional landscape into a smooth, gray, manageable surface.

You'll cry less. You'll also laugh less. Nobody measures that.

The pain was a signal. The anxiety was a signal. The depression was a signal. Your body and soul were screaming that something was deeply wrong.

The system's answer was to mute the speaker so you could go back to functioning inside the very machine that was grinding you down.

I've spent 20 years on the inside of this. I wrote the confession nobody in my field wants to make.

Full article. Link in comments.

AWAKEN.

#psychology #mentalhealth #therapy #psychiatry

[Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin]

The mental health industrial complex is part of a greater antihuman agenda. We've created a medical model where emotional numbness equals mental health. The treatment goal is simple: feel less. The more disconnected from your inner life, the more "recovered" you are. This is emotional lobotomy disguised as care. A person who feels nothing isn't mentally healthy. They're barely alive. Yet that's exactly what the system calls success.

[Fiona French, freedom is bliss @benzosarebad]

Be very very careful who you consult with. Be very very careful and selective when you consider accepting medical advice. Poor attitudes towards patients are not uncommon.

[Psychiatry_Survivor @Psychiatry_Anti]

We've traded the freedom of deep healing for the bondage of lifelong symptom management.

We were created for MUCH more than merely surviving and managing symptoms.

When we stop asking WHY symptoms exist and settle only for suppressing them, we risk exchanging the freedom of healing for the bondage of lifelong symptom management.

Never stop seeking truth, wisdom, and the deeper causes behind suffering!

[JC86 @cubbi10284]

The mental health system is plagued with sycophants.

The mental health system which relies on the absolute authority of the psychiatrist is fertile ground for the unchecked imposition of subjective, often error prone interpretations of trauma.

[Nick Taber @NickTaber]

Mental health professionals, particularly those that work with children, have the ability to essentially brainwash patients into thinking their services are good for them and necessary, even when they don’t actually feel that way.

This is why mental health is such a peculiar discipline. The people who try to lump it in with medicine aren’t being intellectually honest.

[Nick Taber @NickTaber]

It’s more accurate to say that psychiatric diagnoses are based on voted consensus as opposed to biological discovery.

What is at least fraud adjacent is the fact that people are led to believe otherwise.

[Michael Langston @911poet]

Drug-free mental health treatment should be made available to everyone. Other harmful treatments should be excluded as well.

[Susan @BlackshepSusan]

@DuthieAlyne @Ireland2020 @recover2renew I can't say this enough. Social media is getting the word out about psychiatric drug harms.
People are recovering bc of information and advice from lived experience experts on line.
Doctors are failing their patients on a systemic scale.

[Susan @BlackshepSusan]

Thinking back when I was on 4 psych drugs trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was living in total despair, no pleasure only fear and wanting to die. Doctors only explanation was it's your "illness".
Not one ever suggested it could be adverse effects from antidepressants/benzos.
My story is far from rare.
Recovering from psychiatric drug harm is more than unsettling for Psychiatrists/doctors.
It proves them wrong!

[Michael Langston @911poet]

Forced treatment with psychiatric drugs and other harmful psychiatric treatments is a human rights violation that needs to end.

[Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin]

My first experience in the mental health system was working in a children's psychiatric hospital for ages 5-9.

Large percentage were victims of physical & sexual abuse. They were clearly traumatized.

I watched them get drugged up, sedated, & returned back to the abuse.

Why is this allowed to happen??

[Dr. Roger McFillin @DrMcFillin]

If the wrong person describes a teen's moodiness to the wrong person the teen becomes bipolar.

[James Barnes MSc., MA @psychgeist52]

Medical model psychiatry created a worldview built around isolated individuals, internal disorders and defective mechanism—and we all suffer the consequences.

The result has been the systematic individualisation of collective suffering: relational wounds become symptoms, social failures become diagnoses, the consequences of political policies become medical conditions.

[Jorge Hernández PSSD @redpavement]

Getting a Post Drug Syndrome (PSS, PSSD, PFS, etc) or another type of iatrogenic harm, puts you into a battle against the medical system and society:

- Most doctors won't help you.

- Most people won't care.

- Most people in Media or Gov institutions, will ignore you.

- Medical insurance will not cover you.

- Many will discriminate you, tell you it's psychological or somehow blame you.

It's a nightmare only does that have gone through it understand.

[Mikhaila Peterson @MikhailaFuller]

.@LauraDelano was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 14 and spent the next 13 years on psychiatric medications including lithium, Lamictal, Abilify, Effexor, and Ativan.

After being labeled “treatment resistant” and nearly ending her life, she started questioning whether the medications themselves were part of the problem.

In this conversation, Laura walks through what happened when she came off five psychiatric drugs, the years-long withdrawal process that followed, and how she rebuilt her health afterward. She also explains why she founded Intercompass Initiative, a nonprofit helping people taper off psychiatric medications safely.

We discuss:
• Psychiatric drug dependence and withdrawal
• Withdrawal vs. relapse
• Hyperbolic tapering
• The chemical imbalance theory
• Akathisia and neurological symptoms
• Diet and recovery
• Birth control and psychiatric medication
• RFK Jr. and psychiatric drug policy
• TikTok censorship
• Why 1 in 4 Americans are now on psych meds

[BASED PSYCHIATRIST @BasedPsychMD]

If you're hospitalized in a psychiatric institution, they'll treat everything you say as an opportunity to add medications.

Didn't sleep well your first night in a strange, loud ward? Immediate Z-drug.

No appetite because the food is inedible? Maybe an appetite stimulant antidepressant.

Anxious because you've been stripped of autonomy, your phone, and any sense of control? Here's a PRN benzo.

Every normal human reaction to an abnormal environment gets read as a symptom, and every symptom gets a script.

The setting manufactures the very distress it then medicates.

[Nick Taber @NickTaber]

Epistemic violence is a key feature across the mental health system:

When the "treatment" causes harm, the mental health professional blames it on the supposed underlying pathology of the person.

They are able to do this because there isn't much of any scientific grounding to the mental health field, even though the whole premise is that there is.