Posted by Marilyn on April 22, 2001, at 5:37:20
In reply to Re: starting effexor... keep posting.. success/dosage?, posted by lg on October 26, 1999, at 19:09:26
The “Chemical Imbalance” is Born
In 1963, a time in U.S. psychopharmacological infancy, LIFE magazine introduced the broad public to the concept of brain chemical imbalances. Psychiatrists had been experimenting with drugs, particularly LSD, and astounding themselves at the wide variety of behaviors, emotions, and personality changes they could induce in someone with only a tiny spec of the drug. A hypothesis was born out this. If such wide variations in behavior could be made with such a small amount of a drug, which no doubt affected the brain, then any variations from “normal” behavior must be due to extremely fine changes in brain chemistry. The idea that some other external cause of behavioral disturbance could exist seemed to be discarded. Brain chemistry simply needed to be “balanced.” Psychologists such as B.F. Skinner said that scientists could and should control human behavior and predicted that in the future an individuals mood, emotions, and motivation would be maintained at any desired level through the use of drugs.
In 1967, psychiatrist Nathan Klien, an MK-Ultra participant, made a chilling prediction which showed just how much psychiatry wanted to use drugs for behavior control, not for “treating mental illness.” Klien had been studying the effects of psychiatric drugs on “normal humans” and reported that “...the present breadth of drug use may be almost trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man’s life by the year 2000...if we accept the position that human mood, motivation, and emotion are reflections of a neurochemical state of the brain, then drugs can provide a simple, rapid, expedient means to produce any desired neurochemical state we wish. The sooner that we cease to confuse scientific and moral statements about drug use, the sooner we can consider the types of neurochemical states that we wish to provide for people.” [EIR, British Psychiatry: From Eugenics to Assassination, Anton Chaitkin, October 7, 1994, p.39]
Psychiatrists had decided they would provide the public with the types of chemical personality they saw fit. What would follow in the years to come would be the medicalization of any behavior psychiatry deemed “inappropriate.”
As David Kaiser had noted, psychiatrists cannot measure levels of neurotransmitters in the brain in the way doctors can measure sugar levels in a diabetic patient. The question must be asked then, how can you balance or adjust something which cannot be measured? More importantly, does an actual chemical imbalance exist? Parents are told routinely that children given an ADD diagnosis have a chemical imbalance and that amphetaminelike drugs will balance the child's brain chemistry.
Thomas J. Moore, Senior Fellow in Health Policy at George Washington University Medical Center writes that while some "claim hyperactivity in children is a ‘biochemical imbalance’...researchers cannot identify which chemicals...or find abnormal levels" in children. "The chemical imbalance theory has not been established by scientific evidence." [Thomas J. Moore, Prescription for Disaster, 1998, p.22]
It has been pointed out by psychiatrists themselves that the downfall of psychiatric diagnosis is that psychiatrists never look beyond symptoms. If a child is "hyperactive" - a symptom - the psychiatrists say, "He has hyperactivity!" Psychiatrist Sidney Walker says this is like telling your doctor you have a bad cough - a symptom - and getting a "diagnosis" of "coughing disorder", without finding out if the cough is caused from a cold, lung cancer, or tuberculosis. [Sidney Walker, The Hyperactivity Hoax, 1998 p. 6]
Psychiatrists never look beyond "symptoms", they merely classify symptoms as the "disease." Dr. Mary Ann Block says she hates to see children given labels of “hyperactivity” or “attention deficit disorder.” In fact, she refuses to use such labels. She says, “How sad it is to see children drugged while their underlying health problems go untreated.” [Mary Ann Block, No More Ritalin, Treating ADHD Without Drugs, 1996 p.49]
http://www.garynull.com/Documents/HiddenSideOfPsychiatry.htm
Marilyn
poster:Marilyn
thread:13781
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20010417/msgs/60746.html