Amy's Rebuttal to Val's Blog

                                        
 While it is not my intention to be disrespectful to Val or her readers, I have to say I was laughing out loud by the time I finished viewing these videos. While I do stay abreast of current developments in psychiatry and the direction biologically-based psychiatry is almost certain to take (and now with the substantial assistance of the current administration, in the name of public safety), most of my conversations, research & readings are within the Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient (CSX) movement members, trauma-informed researchers, alternative or holistic providers and that ilk. Watching these videos all in a row was a bit of an eye-opener!

  My comments:

  I think Jeff the Coach has carved out a nice niche for himself and I love the idea of well-trained coaches working in disability communities.... what a normalizer! After all, most professional coach types work in more affluent populations, with well-adjusted folks who want a sharper edge or are ironing out a specific difficulty. I do dislike his aggressive insistence on "treatment", the earlier the better, though. There is a great deal of emerging evidence that strongly suggests an over-reliance on medication interventions for these types of issues, not to mention much older evidence that is commonly oppressed. I did a study a few years back on the massive Western Australia RAINE study, 

https://www.health.wa.gov.au/publications/documents/MICADHD_Raine_ADHD_Study_report_022010.pdf

a general health study tracking pregnant women & their children for decades.

 A very interesting sub-study was the contrast between medicated & non-medicated kiddos with ADD & ADHD behaviors & emotions, with pretty conclusive results that the non-medicated group did much better academically, did not 'graduate' to amphetamine use as young adults and did not tend to drop dead of heart attacks on the baseball field at ten years old, as were all demonstrated in the medicated group in statistically significant numbers. 

Now, if Jeff is referring to ADHD treatment like that which is delivered at Dr. Scott Shannon's outfit, Wholeness Center, where the psychiatrists behave like REAL doctors, that is a different matter. Say you are a doc with a wild child in your office. Before labeling that child with a behavioral "illness" (ESPECIALLY in the current climate), dispensing a powerful, addictive medication with many known dangerous adverse effects, and asking a family to completely change their global perspective and become a Family with a Child with a Disorder, doesn't it make sense to rule out allergies, emotional or environmental stressers, physical illness that produces similar effects or brain lesions?

 I can tell you, as a Colorado patient in the behavioral health system, public & private, for over 45 years, that that does NOT happen. (It does at the Wholeness Center! Good on them! http://www.wholeness.com/Home.php ) When I was in the care of psychiatry, even TOTAL care while incarcerated, it was a rare occurrence to see any sort of physical health care, preventative or otherwise, even in so-called integrated settings.

Secondly, the conversation about too many people with "mental illness" in jails & prisons, while accurate & compassionate on the face of it, is a slippery dialogue, because when you take these folks OUT of prison or jail say, here in Colorado, where do you put us? We have no psych beds to speak of; last I heard, we were still right around 50th in the nation for per capita beds. TABOR, so no joy in the future. Oh, public safety..... so, no community based out patient services....

We have the strong presence of Dr Dick Warner, a big proponent of building little villages in frontier areas for folks who can't "make it" in cities. There's the brand new shiny Las Animas project, which could get pretty awful pretty quickly with a few budget cuts. And of course, we have Majorette McCann marching us down the Criminalization Path., you can bet that is coming from somewhere upstairs.  Anyway, dangerous conversation & the coasts, typically five years ahead of us or so, are already planning or building great big new state hospitals, so, here we go again in THAT direction.

 But the laugh fest didn't really begin till David Anderson took the stage.

His winsome comments regarding his experiences irritating fruit flies put me strongly in mind of Cerletti's observations on how pigs sure calm down when shocked in the temples before slaughtering. Folks, when you read or hear words such as "we think that....", "it appears to indicate.....", "the cause may be.....", etc etc, that is scientific speculation, NOT "Science".

Try as these characters might, the Insels, Torreys, Andersons of the world, try as HARD as they might, there is not a single shred of conclusive evidence that emotional distress, odd behaviors or impulsive actions, except of course for the physical causes I mentioned above which are rarely investigated, are a mental illness that is caused by a specific brain function.

I really enjoyed his metaphor regarding pouring oil all over an engine, though, and have used similar comparisons myself. I guess, having experienced many years of psych drugs AND having experienced being off them now for seven years, my car comparison is more brutal, while his, of pouring oil over everything and some may trickle into the right spot sounded very soothing to me. I always said it was like if your car was making a terrible noise and someone opened the hood and bashed the engine to bits with an ax and said, "There! No noise!". Which, sadly, is really more accurate.

 So, I was rolling in the aisle, LMAO, by the time he gets around to describing his big plan to target SPEFICIC neurons, SPECIFIC areas of the brain. I like to imagine the folks down in the quantum physics labs have got it going on, from a scientific POV.... when David Anderson can address how the new physics data show that our thoughts impact our physical plane, and HOW exactly his somatic "treatments", even of ONE neural function in ONE specific spot, impact that wondrous, magical, spiritual process, then he can keep his grubby fingers off my grey matter and my brothers' & sisters' as well. Problem: this IS the current agenda, driven by calls for public safety, (always a SURE way to undermine human & civil rights) big, big federal dollars are going to flow in this direction, and little, if any, into REAL, provable, treatments that POUND our outcomes into the ground. Yes, and that these treatments and only these treatments are increasingly mandated for large portions of our Coloradans. Shame, shame, shame.

 Also, Dawn, as usual, is courageous & inspiring.