The WA Killer

The sad case of the WA state kill spree brings up many issues for me. That's because they blame his behavior on mental illness. And yet, he was a cocaine freak. This is disturbing.

While I was in the mental health system, I saw way too much. Shrinks, teachers, parents, social workers lay upon people blanket labels of mental illness without any medical test developed to actually diagnosis mental illness.

What they are labeling is behavior. Behavior can be caused by all sorts of things, including trauma and biological causes that include drug use. I saw a report on the Oregon Human Services own website on what just one use of methampthetamine does to the brain---permanently. However, later, a person may be given labels of mental illness. The individual of course will welcome such a diagnosis, because this will help lay the blame elsewhere, away from a person's destructive behavior, i.e. use of drugs, to something else "not their fault". Parents like this, too, especially high end parents, where it is socially easier to have a child labeled a mental than a druggee.

There is the issue also of drug and alcohol use by parents when the child is in the womb, or even damaged sperm of the father, from drug use or even age, that is still viable to produce offspring, although the child born may be severely damaged.

Someone sent me links to research on sperm. Often, when a mother uses drugs or alcohol during the time a child is growing and developing in the womb, the woman is the only one deemed a monster, for this behavior. The research indicates what the father does, uses, prior to ejaculation that produces a fetus, also is critical and can drastically affect the health, including the brain health, of the child born. The research was also on the effects on children born when the father was older. Just because a man can still produce sperm, doesn't mean those sperm are healthy sperm and produce healthy children.

There is also an issue with caffeine consumption in young kids and teens. The brain is still developing. Use of stimulants or any other drug during brain formative years is dangerous activity and over use of caffeine, maybe any use of caffeine, at this stage, should be questioned, especially in light of the frequency of ADD diagnoses these days. Many of these kids do not eat much of anything nutritional, let alone drink anything nutritional. What is consumed are high quantities of sugar and caffeine. Do you think a child can behave normally on such drugs?

Lastly, due to superficial subjective diagnostics for mental illness, many lives are being ruined by psychiatry's apathetic ineptitude at its own job. Mine was. Scores of adults, abused as children, are further victimized when psychiatry labels them as faulty with multitudes of psyche labels that follow these unfortunates for life, ruining their lives.

This is never mentioned by the likes of NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) a parents group that tries to get laws passed limiting the rights of individuals labeled with mental illness, so they can be forcibly treated, if necessary, for subjectively diagnoses illnesses.

The trouble is, there really is no treatment out there, for these subjective illnesses. The drugs, anti psychotics mainly, create zombies out of people, by slowing down the brains' capacity to message within itself. The distasteful behaviors sometimes are reduced and this is all society cares about. The side affects of these drugs can be and often are, life threatening, and are at the least, life changing. I remember ballooning in weight, developing disabling constant tremors and twitches, walking off balance, and ending up with vision so blurred I could not even read the headlines on a newspaper. The mental illness industry would call this "a successful outcome." I was made fun of ruthlessly on the streets of Corvallis, as a result of the horrible side affects.

Treatment on a psyche ward of a hospital consists of nothing more than indoctrination about taking the handfuls of expensive mind killing drugs daily. You'd think it wouldn't, in this day and age, but still, the mindset is that you can cure all ills of the mind with handfuls of pills.

But you can't. Many people were brought up in loveless horrifically abusive situations. Many people are horribly lonely, also. I once confronted the head of state mental health, who had expressed great enthusiasm about drugging seniors, who live alone and as a result become depressed.

This is a sign of mental health, to become depressed if chronically alone. Normal people would find a life of total isolation depressing. But the mental health administrators, faced with rising house captive alone senior suicides, thought differently, and began a campaign to drug shut ins. Hence, the face off, between myself, briefly an activist attempting to bring common sense back to the mental health system, and the director.

I quit trying to change the mental health system, after I left it. I was still considered nuts by state groups working for change, because I'd been given the labels. They would patronistically smile, when I would submit detailed suggestions for developing an efficient effective system, then move on to stay the same. Also, I was shocked at the lack of shock at the hard core abuse of patients that goes on. I endured some horrendous abuses on psych wards, including the beating that ruptured my neck. Nobody cared.

These people don't care about mental health of patients when they don't care if you're beaten nearly to death on an Oregon psych ward. I try to grind that into new recruits into the mental health system, if I happen to meet them, that they need to remember these folks are making money off you, that if you have problems, they are not your friends, not your buddies, they're working 9:00 to 5:00, seeing hundreds of people just like you, and they don't care. No good shrink does. They give a person the tools to change themselves and if people do not want to change, to improve, they won't.

Unfortunately, our system preys upon people with emotional holes. I had holes. I'd been abused as a child. Basically, I needed a way to gain self-esteem, find friends, love and move on with my life. Instead, I was given multiple labels, drugged up and stuffed away in a low income hotel, to stare at the walls. This is criminal behavior by our state's system and should not be tolerated by anyone, least not a group that claims to advocate for those so labeled---NAMI. Shame on you NAMI, for your lackluster efforts and misleading name.

The sadness and outrage over the killings in WA is completely justified. But why is there never sadness, empathy or outrage for the victims of psychiatry itself, those whose lives were stolen or ruined, those who have been killed, damaged and maimed by abuse on psyche wards or killed by the drugs forced on them by shrinks, often pushing these drugs to get stipends from drug companies, like common drug runners?

What happened to me in the psyche system, and it happens to many others, was an outrage, a tragedy--an American social systems atrocity. I have never felt any support or concern over what happened from the state's mental health system or the community. Quite the contrary, I've been routinely condemned and criticized for even daring to speak of what happened.

Quite the double standard.

I remember at the very last, not long before I left the system, I had a horrible sensation in my head, of weight to one side, pressure in one area on one side of my brain, causing me dizziness, to fall over, nasaue, pain, inability to walk.

I went to the doctor, who concluded it was a symptom of mental illness, the usual stuff. I ended up attempting suicide, after weeks of this, unable to cope with the suffering. This bizarre sensation finally gradually subsided.

I found out, way later on, it was actually a side affect of withdrawal from Zyprexia, a dangerous psyche drug that would become the object of a class action suit. It caused cholestrol levels in patients to double, triglyceride levels to triple and created thousands upon thousands of chemically induced diabetics in this country. Should the doctors who prescribed it by the score have been indicted? Of course they should have. How about the judges who wrote orders putting the patient, under committment, at the mercy of shrinks, who could then force drug that unfortunate with anything they wanted? Guilty too.

There was no one in this world protecting the most vulnerable people--those with every basic right stripped from them, by the infliction of labels and court committment.

Our society does not have the balls to analyze the real reasons so many people end up hurting or dysfunctional. If we did, things would change. Instead, we go the easy route, of declaring people "mentally ill". But, could the numbers really indicate, that it is our society that is truly sick.

Because psyche labels and committment has been used over hundreds of years to present day, to falsely imprison and ruin the lives of unwanted wives, unruly children, abused women, even union activists and political opponents, there is much at stake in protecting the rights of people subjectively labeled as nuts.