Background
In early 2020, I fell into depression after a life-changing event. I delayed psychiatric treatment for two years, saw a few therapists, but nothing improved. My depression led to severe anger issues and self-harm (non-suicidal). I tried to deal with it, but things got worse after a major breakup in 2022. This pushed me to finally start meds.

2022-2024: On Meds
I’ve been on a mix of antipsychotics, antidepressants, and sleeping pills for 2 years. While they stopped self-harm and reduced anger, the side effects have been unbearable. My GPA has dropped, and I’m failing courses for the first time in my life. The doctor changes meds often, but each comes with new side effects:

Side Effects:

• Nausea, tremors, frequent urination
• Nightmares and almost screaming while waking up
• Sensitivity to noise
• Severe itching, which no allergy meds helped

It’s been exhausting. I even tried meditation and exercise, but the meds made me too tired. Recently, I stopped meds for 3 weeks and while I feel less numb, the anger is back. My doc didn’t diagnose anything major, just anxiety and chemical imbalances. His visits are exhausting (5-hour wait) and no other psychiatrist has my medical records.

Now
I’m tired of meds but don’t want to live in anger and irritability either. What should I do? Therapy hasn’t helped, and switching meds has only caused more side effects. I really need advice on how to move forward.

Currently our laws, thanks to lobbying by psychiatry, incentivize you, if you're suicidal, to 1) Never talk about it and 2) Don't fuck it up if you decide to go through with it.

Because of psychiatry, if you talk about being suicidal you immediately surrender your right to bodily autonomy. You will, at a minimum; be arrested, strip searched, most likely cavity searched, locked in seclusion, and charged tens of thousands of dollars to have your Human Rights violated. Or the cops will simply kill you upon arrival, which we know statistically is extremely common. The most common victim of a police shooting is someone in a mental health crisis. Mentally ill people are 16x more likely to be killed by police than non mentally ill people. And that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you will be restrained, forcibly sedated and electroshocked until you can't even remember who your own mother is anymore.

And this isn't just known and talked about on antipsychiatry forums, this knowledge is widespread. We see memes and posts on pro-psychiatry forums saying things like "Telling my therapist enough to get help, but not enough that they involuntarily hospitalize me." People understand that you can not talk about being suicidal. Doing so can be life-ruining. It is typically life-ruining.

Because of psychiatry people having thoughts of suicide are forced to keep those thoughts to themselves. To never seek help from anyone in any way. They can't talk to friends, family, anyone. And they know they have one shot to get it right. Psychiatry has created within our society the most dangerous situation imaginable. There is a clear solution to stopping the suicide epidemic: abolish psychiatry.

This is an essay I wrote about how I think psychiatry is not legitimate medicine.

Think also of joining my new subreddit r/onlytruemedicine. Thanks. Here goes:

Psychiatry is mostly fake

Exactly as it sounds. It is mostly fake. This is written from a medical doctor’s perspective who has been put through the psychiatric and therapy ringer.

Many people have compared psychiatry to a cult or supernatural religion. It has also been compared to now disgraced social/political movements like nazism - punishing a vulnerable population that it has declared undesirable misfits. Basically psychiatry is at best experimental medicine, on par with witch doctors, healing shamans and primitive ’caveman’ medicine.

Although we have found that some substances do affect behavior, such as alcohol, sugar, caffeine, THC, etc., the application of substances to affect behavior should in no way constitute true medicine.

What is currently called modern psychiatry with its myriad diseases, is nothing more than described sets of grouped behaviors. All behavior can ultimately change by free will and with talk therapy (usually with psychologists and therapists) and ‘will power’ if applied regularly. All medications currently prescribed for “psychiatric mental illnesses” essentially amount to sedatives or other similar substances that problematically affect brain chemistry.

The brain is a biological organ for sure, however, we do not understand how it functions in the least, particularly at the higher levels such as behavior where psychiatric medicine supposedly specializes. We understand the urinary bladder, the lungs, the cardiovascular system, muscles, bones, the hematopoietic system, the digestive system, the peripheral nerves, etc., to a much greater degree.

We do NOT understand the brain, and therefore we should not be mucking with its chemicals, plain and simple.

Psychiatry has never been legitimate. It has always been controversial, thought to be punitive and more prison minded. Psychiatric doctors represent the next generation of formerly punitive faith healers, exorcists, witch trial judges, and any other historically shameful exercise at an early society’s attempt to bring community behavioral cohesion.

Psychiatric controversies, including everything from psychosurgeries such as frontal lobotomy, torture/seizure modalities like ECT (electro-convulsive therapy), etc. have amounted to nothing more than man’s imperfect desire to control behaviors that other people find problematic. Many of the the problematic behaviors of psychiatric patients are rooted in bad childhood experiences such as emotional trauma. It is therefore double punishment to an individual to have suffered in childhood and then to suffer at the hands of supposed doctors wielding poisonous chemicals and demands for punitive compliance in adolescence and adulthood.

It does not matter that psychiatrists have gone to medical schools, even prestigious Ivy League ones, or are licensed by governments to practice medicine. It is NOT true medicine no matter what governing boards they have convinced. They are still considered for the purposes of this essay, and for everyone else, to be mostly illegitimate.

Creating new neural pathways through cognitive exercises is the key to changing behavior. That can only reasonably be done with concerted effort over time at changing bad behaviors. If there is a role for psychiatry at all within this, it may be temporary or mild sedation to quell negative thinking. Long-term use of psychiatric medication is abundantly harmful to most individuals as can be seen throughout the published literature as well as online discussion boards.

Coercion and placebo effect are the main tools employed by modern psychiatrists along with endless experimentation of all the chemicals in their toolbox. These are all ultimately harmful and should not be taken seriously as legitimate medicine.

Because brain function, particularly the cerebrum (and within that the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes, are currently mostly a mystery to science, it goes without saying that tampering with this chemistry is experimental at best, extremely harmful at worst.

Where is the proof for psychiatry? THERE IS NONE! No imaging, no pathologic tissue to sample, no blood tests - nothing but the opinion of a flawed supposedly educated human being is used for diagnosing mental illness. The attempted standardization (must meet for example 3 of 5 criteria in the DSM - diagnostic & statistical manual to be eligible for diagnosis) is still an imperfect system where ‘square pegs’ can be hammered into round holes without too much effort.

If science is ever able to coherently explain how these areas of the brain work, as far as forming thoughts, memories, logic, etc., from a true biological perspective, at that point psychiatry, with treatments reflecting that knowledge, can be given more legitimacy.

What about the idea that there are so many psychiatrists and so many mental health professionals who espouse or agree that medication works? What about that? The entire course of human history is filled with terrible ideas that many many people believed in it one point or another. We should throw modern psychiatry onto that pile. Group hysteria is always just that, a large amount of people believing some thing that has no legitimacy.

Are there any other medical specialties that have such a strong “anti” movement, including Scientologists, critical psychiatry advocates, and the like? Is there an anti-urology movement? Anti-pulmonology movement? No there is not. There is only an anti psychiatry movement. And there is a very good reason for that - no proof. See discussion below.

Who are psychiatrists? They are medical doctors with degrees like MD or DO after their names. Their main job is to write prescriptions for medications.

They are to be distinguished from the REAL or most legitimate mental health practitioners currently out there: therapists and psychologists, with degrees like PhD and LMFT and the like. These are the people that work on behavior from a talk standpoint, where it should remain for now.

Basically: psychology (and other talk therapy) good, psychiatry bad.

Who becomes a psychiatrist anyway? The most emotionally insecure members of the medical school class, that’s who. They are the ones who had emotionally difficult childhoods and likely had a mental health history forced upon them by a psychologically ill parent. So the trans-generational cycle continues in perpetuity and gets amplified onto other unsuspecting poor souls.

The majority of medical students avoid psychiatry like the plague because enduring psychiatry lectures and sitting through their tedious clerkships, where it feels like the whole thing is nothing other than a contorted group of weirdos donned in white coats, endlessly bantering about unprovable conditions and employing specious logic in justifying the coercive application of mind numbing chemicals to troubled gullible individuals.

But haven’t I ever seen someone with mental illness? Someone with schizophrenia or true bipolar (this is distinguished from false bipolar which is a newer diagnosis advocated by pharmaceutical companies to sell medication) who is hearing voices and is out of touch with reality, and is truly dangerous? Yes I have.

Do they have an illness in their brain? Not likely.

They are severely emotionally troubled for sure. No one watched every second of their upbringing and witnessed the kind of emotional trauma they likely endured. They are the way they are due to overwhelming trauma during their formative years most likely.

While it can be posited that there are biological brain differences among us, there is nothing to indicate that a child raised in a safe and secure environment free from emotional trauma would develop mental illness. This is a fallacy that psychiatrists would like you to believe is a biological inevitability, however, like everything else in psychiatry, it is only a guess at best.

Is something biologically different in the brains of schizophrenics and true bipolars? Not anything currently detectable by modern science. So the application of anti-psychotic chemicals upon them is both foolish and dangerous, and tantamount to chemical torture.

Talk therapy with these individuals is time consuming and therefore inefficient. They are capable of logic, free will, and changing their mind to make different decisions, just like the rest of us.

It is however much quicker (and therefore less costly) to hit their brains with toxic substances, but ultimately much worse for them and society at large.

And yes, it buys boats for pharmaceutical executives in the process. Don’t underestimate the profit factor in so-called mental health medications.

But what about people who are convinced psychiatric medicine helped them? My response: Do we truly know it helped them? How do we know they didn’t convince themselves it helped them to avoid the cognitive dissonance of taking poisonous chemicals and spending money and time all for nought? Are there other life circumstances that changed? Relationship or career or other?

Don’t underestimate our desire to legitimize superstition. It feels cognitively better to convince ourselves that a treatment like psychiatric medicine is working for us, rather than face the reality that we made ourselves feel better. And also that the nice “doctor” on the chair or behind the desk holding the prescription pad might actually be a manipulative liar whose main prerogative is his/her own personal profit. You might be to them just the next sucker walking in and out of their door.

To the extent that the psychiatrist might have clinical narcissism themselves, they truly don’t care much about you and only care about themselves and their bottom line. Keeping you a perpetual patient is the most important thing to them.

Psychiatry in the modern era, dealt mainly with the extremely emotionally troubled, the kind that were regularly institutionalized up until around the 1980s when suddenly the emergence of SSRI’s like Prozac hit the market.

Suddenly psychiatry for the masses on demand became the norm. This was an unfortunate error for society. These medications work very poorly and have been mired in controversy, producing weight gain and sexual dysfunction side effects that have been well described in the scientific literature and popular press.

The unfortunate legacy is that psychiatry suddenly became more mainstream (“Prozac Nation” was a bestselling book that generated endless media discussion at the time) for what would be considered the majority of “anxious preoccupied” people out there using the language of attachment theory, those formerly thought to be dealing with the “problems of daily living”.

Psychiatry ultimately should retract back to what it used to be before Prozac. These so-called medications do not work well and mainly only provide false hope for people who should be investing more time and effort in therapy, self exploration and actively changing behaviors.

At this time, modern psychiatry is nothing more than a harmful pseudoscience and should be preferentially avoided at all costs by the outpatient population. Their ‘medications’ are no more effective at curbing or helping undesirable behavior than a tarot card or crystal ball reading psychic is capable of reliably predicting the future. At least in those latter examples no physical or mental coercive practices, or toxic substances are being administered.

Psychiatry is not legitimately a true branch of medicine but rather an extension of law enforcement, with its only utility being its license to sedate dangerous individuals. As psychiatrists, like most humans, are trusting souls not trained to be skeptical of dangerous manipulators, they are delicious targets to be worked on by cunning individuals of the extreme narcissist persuasion (malignant narcissists, psychopaths & sociopaths). An enlightened society should therefore have enhanced or extra rules in place for accessing psychiatry, knowing the inappropriate power they yield relative to the limited ability of its practitioners to detect such dangerous individuals.

Psychiatry should ideally therefore not be legitimate ethical treatment for most people, save only for the most dangerous (ideally already incarcerated) among us. When it is available to the non-prison population, it should not be accessible by the general public, but only on a referral basis.

Any family or individual seeking psychiatric services should have had to go through at least 1 year minimum of talk therapy before being allowed access to a psychiatrist. In the setting of child or disabled adult patients, every major caregiver for the intended psychiatric patient should be required to undergo a rigorous psychological evaluation (MMPI personality testing and interview with knowledgeable skeptical psychologist or equivalent professional) clearing them of dangerous behavior before a single prescription is written.

Does that seem costly and time consuming? It is, but such a process would ultimately do a better job weeding out the manipulative psychologically ill liars with nefarious control intentions (of which unfortunately there are many in the caregiver population) from those true innocent and benevolent individuals who altruistically are trying to help troubled dependents in their care.

It is further thought that with advances in AI or artificial intelligence technology, around the clock talk therapy for emotionally troubled, or even all, people maybe on the short horizon. This may be able to keep people emotionally stable and secure at all times, thereby ultimately replacing the need for harmful controversial psychiatric medicines entirely.

Employing positive thinking, actively instituting a positive mindset, and limiting contact with troublesome individuals works well when applied consistently over time, and may ultimately be the solution for all behavioral, emotional and so-called “psychiatric“ problems.

One can hope and dream.

The too long; didn’t read assessment: psychiatrists currently should not be considered real doctors and they should not be considered to be practicing real medicine. Call it experimental at best. They should be avoided at all costs in favor of talk based therapies, save only for the most dangerous among us.

If we do attempt to legitimize their sedative type chemicals, it should be in a setting of MUCH ENHANCED safeguards for the public than what currently exist today. A much more thorough informed consent process at the outset of psychiatric therapy should be employed right away.

Wake up world!

I find this need for psychiatry to be “fake” or not real medicine is generally an emotional argument.

A lot of what people around here believe is perfectly consistent with a field of medicine in which many providers are poorly trained or malfeasant, where the medical science is in its infancy, and where diagnosis is syndromal and treatment based on trial and error. Other conditions or forms of treatment scattered throughout the rest of medicine will generally have all the same shortcomings. Psychiatry is not fundamentally different, it’s just that it’s on the far end of some of these spectrums.

The most telling thing is that almost all physicians and all medical schools, professional societies and accrediting bodies consider psychiatry a “real” medical field, even if they agree with a lot of the shortcomings mentioned. No one seems to ask themselves why there are zero hospitals, medical schools or licensing bodies who have decided to simply remove psychiatry from their purview. Psychiatry has become an increasingly popular and competitive specialty amongst medical students, not the other way around. But whether medical students want to do it or not is irrelevant to the question at hand.

It will sometimes be claimed that other physicians do not consider psychiatrists real doctors, but this is mostly untrue or at best a half truth. A surgeon might sarcastically, or as an ego boost, say that a psychiatrist is not a real doctor. But only in the same way that they don’t consider dermatologists or radiologists real doctors either. And the moment their patient cries or refuses antibiotics they will be calling psychiatry for help.

Most doctors have no issue with psychiatry as medicine because psychiatry is necessary for a functioning medical system and other docs want to be able to call psychiatry when they get out of their depth. Different specialties practice medicine very differently, but they all speak the same language because they all have the same foundational training. You don’t ask a psychiatrist to workup chest pain, but you don’t ask radiologists, dermatologists or pathologists to do that either. Psychiatry is a much more clinical discipline than some of these other ones mentioned, but they are all a part of medicine and the practicioners are all doctors because you have to go to medical school to fill those roles.

Anyway, it’s a dumb argument unless one first states clearly what specific criteria must be met for a field, a diagnosis or a treatment to constitute “real medicine”. That is never where these posts go though, they just declare psychiatry is not legitimate medicine and then follow that with a fairly standard list of complaints. Again, other medical fields are not completely immune from those complaints, even if much of what they do can be excepted So the insistence on making this fake medicine thing the core argument actually only degrades very legitimate antipsychiatry critiques.

I will take issue with one specific comment as well - that is also not novel. People say that there is no other area of medicine with an anti- movement and use this as evidence that psychiatry must be fake. But this is not true. Any time medicine touches a controversial issue there will be resistance that is more or less organized. There is no anti-pulmonology movement because there is nothing controversial about the lungs and pulmonology does not touch on any polarizing societal or psychological issue.

But there are large, well organized anti-vaccine, anti-abortion (or anti-reproductive medicine more generally) and anti-gender affirming care movements. Regardless of what you think about vaccines, the existence of an anti-vaccine movement is hardly proof that vaccines are fake or that immunology or infectious disease is an illegitimate branch of medicine. There are folks in opposition to cosmetic surgery or performance enhancement medicine, who don’t believe this is medicine in the sense of treating human illness.

Anyway, I would argue that one’s efforts are much better spent exposing and confronting some specific issue with psychiatry rather than this.

MbP, or as it’s now known ‘factitious disorder upon another’, is considered a rare form of child abuse, but it may not be as rare as it is thought to be.

Usually when a physician is duped into this by a crafty parent (usually a mother) it is a pediatrician. But have there been any cases where a psychiatrist is the duped doctor?

Psychiatry, as a unique specialty that is more opinion rather than data based seems particularly prone to attack in this regard.

Could it be that a high percentage of child psychiatrists are unknowingly part of an elaborate abuse mechanism by many well meaning families who are ‘just trying to help their out of control child’ when really there is an underlying unhealthy family dynamic that should be changed instead, but society doesn’t really know how to diagnose or treat that? So instead the child suffers?

Your thoughts please.

The schism is premise for this sub. So here, I am looking to get professional perspectives that patients may not see or agree with. It's more of understanding the nuances of the trade so we can refine debate on the matter.

This is less a psychiatry-specific issue and more a medical research issue as a whole. The idea journals get to make these rules and they be voluntary isn't acceptable, and scientists, physicians, nurses, and anyone else who might publish should have to legally disclose any and all funding towards regardless of relevancy. Failure to do so should carry a heavy fine or brief prison time and having your professional licenses and certifications stripped from you.

Not condoning the violence but I am totally sympathetic to this woman:

https://chroniclet.com/news/402954/woman-denies-mental-illness-will-serve-at-least-14-years-in-attempted-murder-of-parents/

The US has very strong protections for things that fall under freedom of religion. If someone claims that something or not doing something is a legit religious practice, it is often allowed due to these protections for religious freedom. Using this logic, various groups have sought to utilise this to be able to achieve certain goals:

Example 1: The Temple of Satan has utilised religious freedom to give their members better access to abortion in states that restrict abortion.

Example 2: The International Church of Cannabis has utilised religious freedom to give its members better access to marijuana in states that restrict marijuana.

Example 3: Various Native American groups can use hallucinogenic substances under the guise of religious freedom.

Example 4: The Amish are exempt from conscription since they are extreme pacifists.

Example 5: Scientology has had some success in protecting its members from forced psychiatry.

There are many more examples.

Given this, would it be worth creating a Church of Anti-Psychiatry of which would give its members greater protection from forced psychiatry under the guise of religious freedom?

Forgive me, I know this isn't exactly the right sub for this question, but I have no more subs that I'm not banned from.

How do you let the pain out? Every time I start to relax, I'll start to tell people about the way I feel, but this ends up driving them away. For the longest time I couldn't feel it because of all the adrenaline. I was so high that I couldn't feel the pain and stress in my body. I was so lit that I could have had a gunshot wound and not felt it. I looked like starvin' marvin while eating family sized dinners and drinking seven 16 oz beers every night, but at least I had more people around me. Then when I was given the propranolol that blocked the adrenaline, I could suddenly feel all of the emotional and physical pain from decades of living though truly insane bullshit. It was at the worst time possible too being during the virus. I needed someone to hear me but there wasn't hardly anybody. I'm way better now, but I'm still torn between having polite conversations and puking up more of the pain and driving people away. I'm not blaming people for feeling uncomfortable, but I don't know what to do. I can't live with all of this inside of me, but I can't live isolated like letting it out does.

My experience with psychiatry was twenty years ago. The whole experience was burned into my mind. I can remember the sheer insanity and the complete divorce from reality. It's like it just gave everyone a license to believe whatever version of reality they wanted to believe. Anything that ran in opposition was dismissed as some disorder and the person speaking it drugged with haldol so they shut up.

I saw children being drugged because of behavior resulting from blatant abuse. I saw children being electroshocked when the seven different drugs made the kid nuts. Even the schools would threaten parents with CPS and claim child abuse if they didn't put the kid they were annoyed with on adderall.

I'm really wondering if any of this has actually changed. I've heard bits and pieces that make me wonder. The local school mandates the teachers not diagnose or even suggest a disorder. I've seen where actual physical and medical problems are actually being considered. I've even seen where psychs actually acknowledge that there actually might be a problem (like on this sub).

I just want to know if anything has actually changed.

I don't know if I've asked this before, but I'm trying to find information and help for the children of parents on the spectrum. It's becoming more and more clear that this was one of the major reasons for everything being so crazy when I was a kid.

I've looked online and the vast majority of info is for the parents of autistic children, not for the children of autistic parents. The best I've really come across is information for folks who figured out they're autistic in adulthood.

Right now I'm trying to wrap my head around how they process information. For example, I was talking to some other relatives of mine. I would try telling them what happened to me as a kid and they would just keep giving me what I thought was more shit. I got really angry with them until I spoke with their son, who was like "no man, they're autistic. They just don't understand it." I look at my own parents and not only am I starting to see it, but the problems seem to be getting worse. Just recently I discovered that the chimney at my parents house was unstable and could potentially fall into the house. When I brought up the issue with my father, he seriously thought that he could strap it to a tree and leave it at that. I couldn't leave that issue alone and we got it fixed properly, but I'm seeing a slow worsening of things.

I really don't know what to do here. I don't know how to disentangle the way they taught me to see the world vs the way it's normally seen. I don't know how to help them properly deal with emotions. I'll try telling them about a problem and they say they understand but then I'll find out they were just playing along. I just don't know what to do.

Despite a protracted history steeped in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, I find it odd every psychiatrist I have met defaults to medication for everything rather than looking to the cause of why a person is depressed and not just the symptoms in question.

Some things just can't be addressed with pills, and psychotherapy tends to have a lower relapse rate of depressive symptoms compared to medications for a reason. When I look at the psychiatry sub, it's always about the best medication regiment and, rarely, about how to best treat people without medication. I trust psychotherapists more as they have no choice but to talk to you. They can't reach for a prescription pad.

Have you ever had an unusual response while taking benzos? If so, I would appreciate you taking the time to (anonymously) participate in my short survey! Thank you! https://maastrichtuniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bpaEdPhEbemvXsW

While the above two can be carried out simultaneously, many don’t have a lot of choices or freedom. I want to share and record my personal experience quitting meds cold turkey. I have to admit that I am not aware of the subreddit rule until I finish writing, but I want to share my opinion and have a discussion. Still if it violates the rule, please feel free to delete the post.

In my unprofessional and personal opinion, an environment with less stress, routine, healthy diet and support network are way more important and helpful for my recovery, and from my experience, meds didn’t help much when I tried to build the things above. Insights, self-awareness and self-assessment are key. (Although according to some professionals, noncompliance to medication is poor insight.)

I am a 20-year-old college student diagnosed with psychotic depression in early 2023. I have suffered from delusions and hallucinations since I was 15, but they come and go, usually subsiding when there are more social interactions and worsening again when living in stressful environment.

When I entered college, I was so suicidal with all kinds of plans so I finally sought help. My usual dosage was 20mg of Citalopram and 7.5mg of Olanzapine. I personally think they were helpful to a certain extent, especially after a couple weeks of first taking them: I was less suicidal, less paranoid, and less troubled by the obsessive thoughts/ delusions. I am not sure whether this was placebo effect or not. But things got worse in October when I put myself into a very stressful situation where I became suicidal again. I didn’t get out of bed for about 2 weeks, skipped class and assignments, and had to drop courses. What eventually got me to get up and shower and brush was my kind friend inviting me to go out.

I was very frustrated with the meds this time. I have already been suffering from the side effects of them: weight gain and being tired. I must admit that as I was unmotivated to cook, I ate a lot of junk food, so it is not only because of the meds (metabolic effects?), but also my fault.

When I met with the doc a couple days later and talked about the weight gain and the relapse, he just increased the dosage of Citalopram to 40mg and ignored my concerns. I started to doubt whether the meds are effective or not for my situation.

I later switched to another doc who got me on both Abilify and Olanzapine and cut Citalopram. I told him I wanted to taper off the meds, but he said to ‘protect the brain’ I should at least take the lowest dosage.

In mid-December during semester break when being on 2.5 mg of Abilify and Olanzapine, I quitted cold turkey. At the same time, I got on a diet to lose weight. I felt fine. It wasn’t until later that I learned how extremely lucky I am: many suffer from withdrawal syndrome. I lost a bit of weight and felt like I got some self-confidence and control back. When I told my family about quitting meds a week later, they were mad and told me how dangerous it was, suggesting me to go talk to the doc and ask for tapering off instead. But I refused. I was extremely terrified of the thought that going back on meds would put my weight back on and I was rebellious. I don’t want to lose face.

So I never went back to the doc and have been lying to my counsellor about still taking meds since. I am afraid to be thought with poor insight. I also don’t know how to talk about my life when all worries can be attributed to me not taking the meds.

It has been 6 months since I stopped my meds. The goal I have set is to function: go to class, get work done on time, maintain basic hygiene.

There were many moments when I was so troubled by my intrusive thoughts (I don’t really know the difference between obsessions/delusions) that I couldn’t focus to work, from minutes to hours. I realize and acknowledge I really am sick. Usually I either write my thoughts, feelings and behaviors down, and take 200mg of L theanine. These combined with more suitable college courses chosen do help. I was on a diet and lost more weight, feeling better. When I struggled, I talked to my friends, who patiently listened. I am always grateful for them.

I have been struggling to follow my routine since March. I fall off the wagon and have been eating fast food again and cramming for deadlines. Fortunately I still managed to survive the semester with ok grades. But I am a bit lost: I quitted meds cold turkey because I hated the weight gain, why am I allowing myself to fall back in this time? I am disappointed with myself, and there is guilt, shame and endless spiral and vicious cycle: I feel bad about myself, so I stuff myself with shitty food to feel better… but ended up feeling worse. I frankly don’t know how to get out of the pit; I am still kinda ‘functioning’, just not as healthy as I want to.

Anyway, I still don’t want to go back to meds. I know they can help, and the relapse possibility off meds is high. But right now, I want to believe that I am capable of taking care of myself.

Please share your thoughts/ stories/ experiences/ research studies about recovery if you are comfortable with it.

When do you give up?

I'm not necessarily talking like self-deletion. I just mean giving up. All the other kids I grew up with gave up on life a long time ago. They spend their days playing video games and working a shit job just enough to pay for a one bedroom apartment.

I don't blame them. Some have brain damage from what was done to them as children. They certainly have psychological damage. Hell, I think I am the first person who told them that what happened to them as children wasn't their fault. Their whole lives have been where nobody wanted them. Everyone around them secretly wished they would just disappear. I don't think anybody would cry if they did self-delete. They were abused. They were blamed for "needing" the drugs and abuse. They were blamed when the drugs and abuse didn't work. They were blamed for having brain damage. They are blamed for not being able to properly hold a job with said brain damage and anger for what was "their fault".

I was thinking about this, both the people who went through all this as well as myself. I eventually came to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, none of this really matters if it was caused externally or by some made up disorder. The consequences of these things is the reality that we live.

I wonder about my own life. I am one of like two who managed to live a somewhat normal life. I managed to get a decent enough career that pays ok. I have a few cars and a nice apartment. But every single day the past haunts me. Just yesterday I went to a small birthday gathering at a restaurant. I had trouble because of the adrenaline I was feeling while being in a noisy environment. It took me years to figure out that what happened wasn't my fault. It took me years for anybody to even acknowledge any kind of truth. It took me years for know that there was truth. Hell, it took me over a decade for anybody to even hug me.

My question is when should someone give up? I come home to an empty apartment. I wish I had a wife, but I don't think that's going to happen. I missed out on learning basic things like how to date. If I ask for help, it's like pulling teeth to get people to even understand the statement. I wish my life had value. It has value in the sense that I can donate money to something, but not in the sense that I myself am needed.

When should someone give up?

The other day I was arguing with a "doctor" (who I later found out was actually a nurse who had a MD rubber stamp everything). I was trying to get propranolol because the MD that originally gave me it has since moved away. The lady asked me why I needed it. I told her about how I had debilitating levels of adrenaline for decades and that propranolol stopped it.

Anyways, long story short, she just couldn't accept the words I was saying. First she suggested that I was dealing with anxiety, then a thyroid problem, then a cardiac problem, etc. When she finally gave up, she told me that she would prescribe the meds. I later found out that she prescribed literally 10 pills.

The point is that throughout my life, I've had trouble getting people to understand my experiences. It was like the more it deviated from everyday life, the more invisible it was to the rest of society. Like for example, I grew up in a cult, but people honestly saw it as a normal christian church. They could see the churches that were kinda off the rails for what they were, but the ones like mine that were totally different were just imperceptible.

Throughout my whole life, I've tried to tell people what was happening or later what had happened, and it was always like I was speaking a different language. It's not just me either. I've known people who had bat shit crazy things happen as children, but when it's spoken it's like the normal persons brain just doesn't compute. They don't think they're lying. They don't think me or whoever is crazy. It's like the other persons brain tries to associate what I'm saying with the closest plausible experience they've had, and they end up thinking that's what I'm talking about.

Why is this?

Seriously, what is it with people?

I'm just wondering because before I started to get better, I was so high on adrenaline that I could probably not feel pain if I had been shot with a bullet. I couldn't feel my own emotions. All I could feel was just never ending panic. My metabolism was so high that I drank seven 16oz beers every single night and was noticeably underweight. I couldn't hear the words to songs on the radio. I was super aggressive and confrontational with literally everyone. I didn't even know what was wrong with me, and I guess everyone around me just pretended (no joke) like nothing was wrong.

When I started to recover, the repressed emotions started to come up, and the past four years has been dealing with all the emotions from twenty years ago. It didn't come all at once, but rather I would get some and as a I recovered more came.

My question is do any of you know when that process is done? I'm night and day better then I was, but at the same time I am still walking through that process and don't know where the end is so I can have a normal life. I just want to know if any of you have been though something similar, what changed when you got to the other end of it all?

I just had a talk with my grandfather. He told me that he didn't really interact with me or be around me because I made him feel uncomfortable. He was told to "not get involved". I know he wasn't the only one who felt and acted that way around me. Every time I try and tell him what happened, he insists that it was my fault because I was so unagreeable, and that the past only effects me because I let it.

What happened was twenty years ago. I was drugged and experimented on while being told it was all normal. It taught me a very warped view of myself and the world around me. I insist that I need validation and acknowledgement of what happened, but I'm told that I'm really asking for sympathy and a pity party.

Anybody else experienced this?

Title.

When I was a kid, I would imagine how much happier everyone would be if I died. I felt like self-deletion was the responsible thing, but I guess people felt like not everything was justified by the common good. I would imagine myself bleeding to death with the people I loved watching and feeling happy. I felt so guilty for being who I was.

I have to leave my dog with my grandparents (who are ex-psych nurses) because I'm moving overseas, and I need some time to find an apartment that accepts dogs. I'm terrified he'll be upset I left him, and they'll put him on anxiety meds or something. Is there anything I can do to protect him?