Talking Back to Voices in One’s Head

The NYTimes yesterday ran a story on how group talk therapy is helping some mental health patients who are hearing voices reclaim their dignity of self-determination, by helping them understand the meanings of the internal thoughts they are “hearing” (simply by asking them!), and extricate themselves from the morass that is psychiatric/psychotropic drugs.

An Alternative Form of Mental Health Care Gains a Foothold

In the comments section, some people are chiming in (in more polite and PC terms, of course), that “talk therapy” is in fact old, but has been eclipsed and obfuscated in recent years by a big-pharma driven “just-drug-’em-all” modality that has engulfed psychiatry and mental health services.   Not that some drugs don’t help some people live more normal lives.  But we should have clearer definitions of what “normal” means, what “help” means, and exactly whom is being “helped”.  Sometimes it’s not even the patient. ($kaching kaching$)

That article reminds me of the true story movie “A Beautiful Mind“, about math genius John Nash, who was hallucinating, but the drugs to suppress the hallucinations made a zombie out of him and were destroying his career, marriage, and family. So he simply went off the drugs, taught himself to distinguish hallucinations from reality, and lived a normal life. The real Nash died in a taxi car crash only last year at age 86.

Applause are in order for the people in this article who are helping other people cope with life without dangerous permanent psychiatric drugs.

But we should also be discussing the research going on in the last 5 years revealing how many schizophrenia cases turn out to actually be just brain infections (namely toxoplasmosis), which existing antibiotics can cure!

Just google “schizophrenia antibiotics“.

~ Investigator