The ASCP is making sure they are seen showing-up to the deprescribing conversation, deliberately deflecting accountability and concern for patient safety in favor of their transparent panic around the failing reputation of psychiatry overall.
Having successfully got through a gradual hyperbolic taper when two previous attempts to get off psychiatric drugs landed me on locked wards I can vouch for the fact that safer deprescribing would revolutionise mental health.
While it’s vital that physiological dependence and withdrawal are acknowledged and addressed the prevailing idea that if the original difficulties are indeed reoccurring (a “relapse”), then reinstating the drug is the logical solution, is also a flawed conclusion that equally needs to be resisted.
If people are having human reactions to adverse life events and circumstances then suppressing these by altering normal brain chemistry is not the best solution - this is commonly acknowledged when people “self-medicate” and logically also holds true for prescription psychotropics too.
I had been put on “bipolar” medications because of my reactions to trauma and so was left with getting through physiological withdrawal and also dealing with and healing from my life circumstances simultaneously, with nothing but opposition from most family and friends thanks to the fact that psychiatrists had said I “needed” long term psychiatric “medication”.
So we shouldn’t, I believe, get too hung up on trying to distinguish withdrawal and “relapse”, as the original overwhelming life circumstances or trauma will likely still be there, and still have to be dealt with, unless the patient is content to be emotionally suppressed long term (which they may not even be aware of because of intoxication anosognesia - the true “lack of insight”).
The very term “relapse” belongs to the misleading disease model - instead we need to offer people effective non-drug approaches to address their very real social and psychological problems AND ensure fully informed consent for those considering psychotropic chemicals, and safer tapering for all those who want to come off them.
No wonder mainstream psychiatry is denying dependence and withdrawal like their mortgages depend on it. Because my doctors certainly didn’t seem to want to earn their living supporting me to get out of my abusive marriage or heal from my childhood trauma or survive a sexist and racist and Islamophobic society…
The ASCP is making sure they are seen showing-up to the deprescribing conversation, deliberately deflecting accountability and concern for patient safety in favor of their transparent panic around the failing reputation of psychiatry overall.
So well said!
Having successfully got through a gradual hyperbolic taper when two previous attempts to get off psychiatric drugs landed me on locked wards I can vouch for the fact that safer deprescribing would revolutionise mental health.
While it’s vital that physiological dependence and withdrawal are acknowledged and addressed the prevailing idea that if the original difficulties are indeed reoccurring (a “relapse”), then reinstating the drug is the logical solution, is also a flawed conclusion that equally needs to be resisted.
If people are having human reactions to adverse life events and circumstances then suppressing these by altering normal brain chemistry is not the best solution - this is commonly acknowledged when people “self-medicate” and logically also holds true for prescription psychotropics too.
I had been put on “bipolar” medications because of my reactions to trauma and so was left with getting through physiological withdrawal and also dealing with and healing from my life circumstances simultaneously, with nothing but opposition from most family and friends thanks to the fact that psychiatrists had said I “needed” long term psychiatric “medication”.
So we shouldn’t, I believe, get too hung up on trying to distinguish withdrawal and “relapse”, as the original overwhelming life circumstances or trauma will likely still be there, and still have to be dealt with, unless the patient is content to be emotionally suppressed long term (which they may not even be aware of because of intoxication anosognesia - the true “lack of insight”).
The very term “relapse” belongs to the misleading disease model - instead we need to offer people effective non-drug approaches to address their very real social and psychological problems AND ensure fully informed consent for those considering psychotropic chemicals, and safer tapering for all those who want to come off them.
No wonder mainstream psychiatry is denying dependence and withdrawal like their mortgages depend on it. Because my doctors certainly didn’t seem to want to earn their living supporting me to get out of my abusive marriage or heal from my childhood trauma or survive a sexist and racist and Islamophobic society…