The Trouble with Psychiatric Medication

The Trouble with Psychiatric Medication

By

Gavin Bushe

Psychiatric Survivor

I am not a pharmacologist.  I merely understand that what you put into your body has effects on your body, mind, and soul.  So it is with bio-psychiatric medication.  These are clearly toxic substances that have a nebulous effect on the mind and the emotions.  I can only speak with authority on my own experience so I shall do that here for the record.  Perhaps other readers can share their stories of psychiatric medication to illuminate our growing social body of lived experience and knowledge.

I was first given psychiatric medication as a 16 year old.  I resisted but the psychiatrist Dr. Paula McKay insisted using the recruitment of my mother as a social lever to get me to take them.  The drug was called Sertraline.  I later noticed many unpleasant side-effects and social interactive problems due to nervousness and involuntary motions of my body.  I continued on that drug for many years despite my protests until another doctor decided to give me Zyprexa (Olanzapine).  This is a very powerful sedative that caused weight gain, shaking of the arms, and drowsiness.  I remember slumping over the machines at work due to Zyprexa.

It was in relation to Zyprexa that I undertook my two para-suicides.  It is such a powerful drug  that 30 milligrams will effectively knock out a man.  After I had taken 280 milligrams as an overdose I was knocked out for quite some time.  My only grace in that was waking up to see my mother standing over my weakened body at the hospital.

My relationship to medication is ambiguous.  It is difficult to say whether the drugs are causing a mental health problem or remedying one.  I do know that drastic variations in drug intake is extremely bad for the pill-taker.  Under advisement from an alternative medical practitioner in 2010 I had come off the drugs.  I went cold-turkey.  It was a bad move which dogged me for 10 years until the matter was resolved by an agreement to take a depot injection of haliperidol.  That agreement required my torture at the hands of several bands of psychiatric clinicians who had held me down and forcibly injected me on the numerous occasions that I was involuntarily detained by the State Psychiatric Services.

Today I can only advise not to have anything to do with the State Psychiatric Services in Ireland.  If you are a person with trauma and emotional vulnerability try seeking the help of ANYONE BUT a bio-psychiatrist, e.g. a counsellor, a reflexologist, a naturopath, an acupuncturist, etc.  The best way to deal with psychiatric medication is to not go on them in the first place. But I warn you that once your body has adjusted to taking these toxins you probably will have to endure them always going forward unless you have an intelligent plan to detoxify from them gradually.

The trouble with psychiatric medication is that you don’t know whether your behaviour is your own or is caused by the drugs.  That in itself is a theft from your own mind of self-knowledge.  I urge extreme caution in all affairs to do with psychiatric medication.  Seek advice.  Seek personal safety. Be cautious with psychiatric medication.