Fwd: New Meetup Group: The London Goddess Group

Not sure exactly why this is amusing. Still, if you're looking for god then this is a good place to meet one.

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Meetup" <info@meetup.com>
Date: 8 Dec 2011 21:14
Subject: New Meetup Group: The London Goddess Group
To: <arj.name@googlemail.com>

New Meetup Group!

The London Goddess Group

Listed in: Spirituality, Meditation, London, Women's Empowerment, Personal Growth thru Spirituality and Meditation, and 10 more topics.

Organized by:
Zoe

Check it out! →

A long time ago (and still in many tribal societies) woman used to sit in circle- to discuss life, to connect with spirit, and generally connect with the sisterhood. In recent times, this connection to our divine essence, and to a feeling of sisterhood, has generally been lost..... This group is a chance to reconnect with that essence- to sit in circle, to delve deep inside, to connect with the Divine... [read more]

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What if mental healthcare focused on the sociol model of treatment?

I'm almost through a bottle of wine as I sit here out in the park.

In practice so little of the considerations of sociology and mental health are applied. It is all too abstract and rradical. Alternatively you might say psychiatry is too powerful.

Psychiatry's dogma includes the social model when it comes to prognosis on social outcomes. So little of what psychiatry does is to thing along those lines when it comes to treatment.

It isn't in their mindset. Doctors are generally recruited through a set of similar experiences and education. Sociology and wide life experience are not part of the path for most doctors.

Sociolgists also don't do much stuff in practice. They rarely apply their theory effectively. There is little impact.

Things are changing but it is still pissing in the ocean. Doctors are still biomedically trained. Their knowledge of the biopsychosocial model and the sociological model is poor. This is about their basic training before they become specialised.

They don't learn to think. This is why new avenues which genuinely better the biomedical model of treatment's goal are coming from outside biomedical mainstream. Time to change is one example. Part of the partnership are two charities which

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You must call it schizophrenic

The word must adhere to a concept.

It is a human type. An individual classified by a label and pathologised and pejoratised as well as discriminated and disadvantaged

If you bow to the language of illness you bow to the power to normalise and change this essential and valuable yet maligned human type.

If you respect the diversity of the human race and value it like I do then you can not use the language of illness to describe human types. Schizophrenia as a disease is as valuable and true a concept as negritude.

This is why language and concepts are important.

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Do drug or not to drug?

This is an important question related to the treatment of schizophrenia.

Now let me be clear. I self medicate using alcohol and cannabis. I used to be medicated by psychiatrists and I didn't like it.

Other people haven't taken this path. They welcome the psychiatric drugs and the hope it gives them that it treats the disease. Antipsychotics are still the mainstay of psychiatric treatment. The drugs are often prescribed for life.

Schizophrenia is a behavioural and emotional disorder which is meant to be caused by brain differences. Again, I disagree. Regardless of my opinion, the drugs don't treat the brain illness.

As far as I am aware there are no treatments for brain illnesses in general use though there is some pioneering work which might change this. Major tranquiliser drugs actually cause brain differences. High doses used in monkeys in a placebo controlled study showed 8-11% loss of brain weight in the treatment group. Reviews have shown small loses in brain matter in humans. The drugs also cause illness, side effects and early death.

They don't treat the core pathology of schizophrenia. They are not scientifically proven to stop the delusions and hallucinations. A study on clozapine said few patients experienced any antipsychotic effect. Those that did said it barely reduced the voices. (It made me think are patients on cloazpine poor placebo responders which is why other drugs don't work). Clozapine is the most potent and dangerous psychiatric drug. It has killed many people worldwide. It is also supposed to be the most effective treatment for schizophrenia.

It doesn't heal the brain and it kills the patient. So what does it do? It shackles the person using chemicals to stop their expression and thereby makes them easier to deal with. It is used to suppress unwanted behaviour by making a person relaxed and docile.

It does not treat the biological problem and the dopamine theory of schizophrenia has been repeatedly debunked by people like Robert Whitaker. It treats the person in the sense a pain killer treats something. These drug reduce pain but don't actually treat the cause.

The problem is the pain which major tranquiliser drugs treat isn't the pain of the individual. It isn't real pain. It treats the insignificant pain of individuals and society who have become used to a world where people don't act strange or odd or different or crazy.

It just takes looking at the use of the drug in dementia patients to see what it is really doing. It wasn't used for dementia patients before. Just schizophrenics. The convenience of the drug meant that carers and care home workers could have docile, easy to manage people. Then it was discovered that 1,800 old people died because of this drug every single damn year.

People could learn to accept and learn to deal with unusual or challenging behaviour from their elders...or they can use psychiatric drugs to make people relaxed and docile so they don't exhibit behaviours which are considered unusual or difficult to deal with in modern society...and kill them.

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If jesus was alive in the time of psychiatry he'd have gone back to being a carpenter

This is a quote from a psychiatrist. I think I read it at psychquotes.org.

It says a lot or perhaps I can find a lot of meaning in it.

Jesus would have been mostly likely diagnosed with schizophrenia. His experiences of god are now pathologised as schizophrenia. Its possible to see other saints and prophets may also be diagnosed with schizophrenia in the psychiatric interpretation of this experience of an altered reality. Moses spoke to a burning bush. Muhammed was said to go pale and feverish as he spoke the words which became the quran. In fact it was his wife, Sara, who wrote the quran since he was not in a state to transcribe it.

I think in other posts I've spoken about how posychiatry replaces religion's role in understanding these unusual experiences. Psychiatry doesn't attempt to find meaning in people's delusions and hallucinations. Pioneers like RD Laing thought there may be meaning to the madness but few psychiatrists listen.

Psychiatry sees the experiences which jesus had as spurious and without meaning. I disgree over this matter of opinion but psychiatry enforces its perspective on patients.

This psychiatrist in essence describes a mode of treatment: continuation of life course. Jesus went from being a carpenter to being a hippie bum. It was lucky that at the time most people were poor so when this schizophrenic dropped out of normal life to become this altrusitic hippie guy and do all those good things which were retold down the generations. If he were born today he'd be dealt with differently.

In fact modern psychiatry doesn't do enough to help a person continue their life course after a psychotic break. This is what is most interesting to me. The idea is that psychiatry makes life crisis just a blip in a personls life course. This isn't true but it should be for those who chose to find no meaning in their experience.

I had my first psychotic break about 9 years ago. I saw auras and spoke to god. My experience of reality was significantly shifted.

I was diagnosed with bipolar with paranoid features.  I was labelled crazy and sectioned and drugged. I was fired from a well paid graduate job at an award winning blue chip company.

For a year I didn't work. I just got drunk and stoned. I've never stopped really. My first job was putting leaflets through people's letter boxes telling them when their refuse would be collected. Then I had a job collecting and distributing post in a large council department.

This wasn't a continuation of life course after a psychotic episode. My life went downhill quickly. I managed to work myself up in the organisation but I have never really recovered my life course.

I'm not fucking jesus either. I'm just a person trying to survive. The fact is I now avoid psychiatry unless I'm desperate and then they don't help me anyway.

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Change the world

Simple answer. This is the future of mental healthcare.

Or not. Make normal what is different. Make ugly what is beautiful. Be shortsighted when human progress depends on the foresighted.

Break down those things which fetter a human's potential to be and beat those outcomes. Then we have the future of mental healthcare.

But ii dream dreams where people want progress rather than wallow in their own shit.

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What the fuck is the solution?

I may be mad but I have a question....

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