[D66] Impact of New Serotonin Study

[René Oudeweg]

madinamerica.com
<https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/08/psychiatric-survivors-reflect-serotonin-study/>



  Loss, Grief, and Betrayal: Psychiatric Survivors Reflect on the Impact
  of New Serotonin Study - Mad In America

Karin Jervert
20-25 minutes
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Loss, grief, and a sense of betrayal are felt deeply by many who have
been affected by the myth of the chemical imbalance—a myth given so much
attention over so many decades that it became the most pervasive way we
understood emotional suffering. The myth of the chemical imbalance
became so powerful that it overcame the truths of the human condition
itself.

With the recent publication of the Moncrieff et al study, which reviewed
decades of research, the chemical imbalance myth was shown to have no
support in scientific evidence. The theory of a chemical imbalance is a
myth, and has always been a myth.

As psychiatric survivors, we—Karin Jervert and Marnie Wedlake—were
inspired by the paper and the attention it gained. Thinking about all
those who are now realizing they have been lied to by doctors, family,
and friends, we took some time to look back on what it felt like when we
came to that realization. We hope it will help those going through the
endless layers of anger, grief, and loss after learning of this betrayal.* *

A collaborative art piece by Marnie and Karin. A drawing of the solitary
cell Karin was in days after 9/11/2001 overlayed onto a photograph of
the window in the room Marnie spent 333 days in, the longest of her
inpatient stays at the London Psychiatric Hospital during the early 1990s.


          *What do those in power do when a significant weapon of
          control, like the chemical imbalance theory, is deconstructed
          and decommissioned? *

/Karin:/ The chemical imbalance theory has served a very real purpose of
social control.

So, it’s really important that we realize where we are as a people right
now. At its root, this is a public conversation about human suffering.
With the serotonin theory of depression finally being put to rest and
the biomedical model in question on a wider scale, it is open hunting
season for a new narrative around why we suffer.

Who else will take the reins of public opinion and use it to their
advantage? So many people are realizing the massive harm that has been
done to them and their loved ones, and we should be watching for anyone
sowing more discord rather than encouraging the very careful and
purposeful healing that needs to be done here.

The biomedical model, of which the serotonin theory of depression is a
part, has always been best at two things in Western society. One of
those things is self-blame—drawing the external circumstances of
systemic oppression, in all its forms, into our own bodies so we would
ignore the ways the system we existed in failed us.

Secondly, it was and still is such an effective way to make a profit
from taking a group of discontented people suffering under oppressive
systems and shut them up—pile on the stigma, and put them away.

/Marnie:/ Psychiatry may admit to not knowing what causes “mental
illness.” Psychiatry may profess dedication to finding what causes
“mental illness,” but only if these “causes” align with the heavily
favoured biomedical narrative. Too often, suggestions of anything that
might be causal which do not align with the biomedical narrative are met
with venom and vitriol. This is not scientific inquiry. By its
demonstration, psychiatry is not doing research to find the cause of
mental illness.

Psychiatry is doing research to confirm the narrative needed to
legitimize its existence. Survivors are left wondering, where are our
voices in this quest to find the cause? How is it that an entire
sub-specialty of medicine, aided and abetted by all of its secondary
players, can be deaf to the voices of those of us who say we have been
harmed by our time in their systems of care? Simply stated, our
experiences do not fit in their story.


          *How do we live with the constant fear of being ourselves
          after being involuntarily detained or treated by psychiatry,
          an industry that can coerce, gaslight, inflict violence,
          traumatize, and chemically restrain a person at any moment for
          any reason?*

/Karin:/ The trauma of being put away for what we term as psychiatric
experiences, without any say in your care, left me knowing one thing
more than anything else in this life. /The cruelty of others is
immeasurable and can never be underestimated. Especially those who say
they care. /

Can you imagine? This is what I walk in the world with every day since I
was 21. It is not true. The opposite could be and is often just as true.
But because of the treatment I experienced and the betrayals of doctors,
my family and friends, this is what I know better than anything else. I
also know I am not free. I have a note on my medical records that makes
me less free. If freedom is a real thing, I am less free because I
cannot get angry, sad, or frustrated. I cannot call out anyone with
power over me or be myself for fear of retribution in the form of
incarceration in a psychiatric institution.

I am even afraid being a queer woman with tattoos. Because that seems
one more way this power dynamic could be used to put me away on a hair
trigger. This fear is not negligible, it is not dismissable. It is real.

The thing to keep in mind, for those who have learned about the
Moncrieff et al study, is that when you go to your doctor to say, “so, I
don’t have a chemical imbalance…?” Please be prepared for the
gaslighting that will ensue. There are resources for meeting with your
doctor from the organizations we mention below.

/Marnie:/ Being deeply entrenched in the system as a patient was, for
me, a prolonged period of assimilation and indoctrination. How I was
supposed to think about and understand my thoughts, my feelings, my
self—all of this was dictated to me by those who were in charge of my
care. Accepting their authority, without question, was expected. In this
regard, there was no choice but to accept the biomedical narrative, and
what that narrative meant for me.

The brutality of coercion, especially on the inpatient units, was
stealthy, not visible to outsiders. Orders were given. Consent was not
informed. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Looking back, I see that so much, that
was so wrong, was dictated to us, as patients in a psych hospital. We
were made to believe the unacceptable was acceptable.

And there was no choice but to use psychiatry’s beliefs to explain the
distress and internal chaos that were my norm. To question those beliefs
was to question psychiatry’s authority, and questioning that authority
was akin to being a non-compliant “behaviour problem.” It didn’t take
long before any will to question, to wonder, was gone. This is just how
it was.

Through willful blindness, psychiatry, and mental health care more
broadly, push people to the margins of their own communities. Inherent
within the experiences of being identified and “treated” as one who is
“mentally ill” is a process of separation. To identify someone as a
mental patient is to render them fundamentally different from a socially
constructed norm. To be distinguished in this way is to be separated
from one’s kin. Being isolated in this way creates a loneliness like no
other.

Ad nauseam, mainstream mental health care responds to statements like
ours by saying, “this is stigma, we’re fighting against stigma!” That
same willful blindness disguises the fact that this stigma, that
mainstream mental health care is apparently campaigning so valiantly
against, is actually a direct by-product of a system of “care” that
insists on medicalizing and pathologizing natural and expected responses
to trauma and adversity.


          *What does a person do who finds they have been so deeply
          betrayed by those who claimed to be helping them—by doctors,
          society, friends, and family?*

/Karin:/ In all my work as an activist there was something reassuring, I
guess, about the narrative being something like a barge that we had to
turn, and that barge was stubborn and heavy and big…and slow. It was
reassuring because I also knew very well how slow healing happens.
Something about the slowness made me think that the healing that needed
to happen could happen while we moved people towards understanding their
suffering differently.

But the Moncrieff et al study is waking a lot of people up to their
psychiatric survivor status very abruptly. Some may be realizing that a
loved one who died by suicide might have been a victim of psychiatry.
That is a lot to come to terms with.

I look at what happened to me when I realized the damage that had been
done by those that peddled the “chemical imbalance” theory of suffering,
when I realized the lie I was told. And the thing I remember most is the
betrayal and anger. The rage really. I mean, I can still feel it. It’s
very real inside me still when I think about it. I nearly threw up
thinking about how many people this is happening to right now since this
study was published because I remember what this was like.

For those who are feeling this for the first time, I want to say
something important. Please listen to psychiatric survivors’ experiences
with withdrawal and do not cold turkey the antidepressants. I know they
are a little grenade in your mouth, swallowing some kind of trauma bomb,
the pain of that is real. It ends up feeling like a retraumatization
every time you put that thing up to your lips. And you know there was so
much more wrong with your world than a broken brain when they put you on
them. You know no one was listening to what you told them about the ways
they hurt you, the ways your grief was silenced and ignored, the ways
the abusers were just given a pass to keep abusing you…I know.

But, the dangers of SSRI withdrawal are real and so horrific, too. I
know… when does it end? You know where it ends? When you find peers to
talk to about what this feels like. We’ve got some resources at the
bottom of this page to check out for support.

/Marnie:/ Friends disappeared. Family members chose the diagnoses.
Society saw me as a mental patient. “Healers” were anything but.
Everyone who knew me saw a mental patient first. No one listened. It
seemed they saw no need for this. What I had to say was filtered through
a prescribed lens, the lens of psych diagnoses.

My self? My person? My individuality? These were exchanged for the
identity that was applied to me by psychiatry, the ruling authority.
This was an authority that became everything. It didn’t take long to
figure out that speaking /as me/ was viewed as “talking back.” Accepting
the silencing and the oppression was essential. To do otherwise made all
that was so hard, that much harder.

If those who care about and for us don’t know they are betraying us, is
it actually betrayal? Yes. Absolutely and without doubt. And when I
think about this, and I think about speaking with family about this, my
history of experience suggests their responses would show their
sensibilities had been offended. /“We didn’t know. We did what we
thought was best.”/

Really, it felt as though no one genuinely wanted to know … about me,
about why I was so distressed. References to trauma and adversity were
stuffed behind the diagnoses. The diagnoses were what mattered. And so,
like many, I internalized the belief that all I had experienced didn’t
count … none of it mattered, and certainly not enough to offer any
viable explanation …/I was the problem/. Like those nightmares where
you’re screaming but no sound is coming out of your throat … it doesn’t
take long to learn there’s no point in screaming … apathy takes root.

Long after the time when I emancipated myself from the system, the
silencing and the oppression continued. I used to think it was possible
to move beyond this sense of betrayal. I’m no longer so sure … so much
damage was done … I see subtle signs that broken trusts may not ever be
repaired. When I watch myself, I see that I’m guarded, almost always … I
don’t need to wonder where this comes from. What do I do with this sense
of betrayal? Mostly, I keep it hidden.


          *How do we sit with the layers of grief and loss as we look
          back at the ways our lives could have been different?*

/Karin:/ In the last few years, I have turned to earth based
spirituality—camping, gardening, art making (of course), and writing.
These things saved me from falling into a constant state of rage. And
that kind of rage, I feel, is more effective than even psychiatry at
destroying a person. So I had to let it go the best I could.

But, still, with everything I went through, the anger and the pain are
sometimes so overwhelming. The fact that what I was told about my
suffering was all an unproven lie, that I had nearly lost everything,
including my life, to their treatment while everyone I loved looked on,
convinced of their compassion for me, was a betrayal of almost
unimaginable proportions. Even as I got well, a horrific journey towards
it through withdrawal, and forgave the people in my life I could, the
anger only amplified—how much suffering could a “healer” inflict on
someone who came to them in pain?

It’s mind blowing. It was absolutely horrific. Like Marnie, I lost
friends, was in conflict with seemingly everyone just to find freedom
from what I knew was killing me. I was isolated from my community. The
feeling of this loss, for me, was like a grenade going off in my chest
every day.

To all those bombs going off all across the world right now
post-Moncrieff et al, please, please find us—psychiatric survivors—we
can get through this together.

/Marnie:/ The past is the past … many talk about the importance of
letting go, of moving on … but awareness isn’t in the past, and there
are times when the layers of grief, the feelings of loss, can feel as
though they will crush my chest, taking away my very breath. Grief comes
in waves—tidal waves—without warning, they wash into, and over, my life,
my self. Awareness of all that was lost, taken, stolen … this lives as a
permanence within me. How can it not?

While my emancipation is without regret, my history is alive. All that
never was and will never be … these realizations come as a deafening
roar that can fill my mind. In those times when this despairing turmoil
lands in my awareness, it brings with it a loneliness, inspired by
knowing that most of the people I know and interact with in my
day-to-day life do not—cannot—come even close to relating to any of
this. It’s a deeply felt loneliness, and these feelings of invisibility
and invalidation stay fresh in my mind. Choices are made based on this
sticky residue. And so, sitting with this grief means living with more
self-silencing. It’s become the lesser of evils.


          *How is our culture isolating us from each other and
          preventing us from feeling safe being ourselves in the world?*

/Karin:/ This for me, has always boiled down to marketing. It’s
important to ask what, about any messages you receive, is in their own
interest for you to believe about yourself and others? Regarding the
question here, who does it serve to limit what resources in mental
health we believe are available to us? What we believe about what
dangers lurk in the community around us? The media creates narratives
around all this, and narrative creates our “reality,” or a version of it
anyway.

The stories we tell each other about mental health and community
resources around emotional suffering are at the core of our survival—as
individuals and a community.

Sowing divisiveness and conflict is a part of a constant barrage of
messaging. There is an “us” and a “them.” And emotional suffering makes
you a vulnerable “them,” so it should be avoided, “fixed,” or shut down
immediately. No less important is the narrative of lack that makes its
imprint on our social and inner lives—constantly putting us in a state
of disappointment in ourselves, our bodies, and our identities. We
always have something to reach for to “fix” what is wrong with us, but
it is never reaching for one another, or community resources, for the
compassion and validation we need.

Alternative resources exist in the Mad Pride Movement, the Psychiatric
Survivor movement and other movements in the field of mental health.
Alternative narratives that conflicted with the biomedical model, like
Open Dialogue, for example, which is a wonderful way to approach altered
states, never gained the traction they deserved. Because it dared to
think people could recover, and considered the faults of the systems
around a person instead of blaming their chemistry.

/Marnie:/ To be a mental patient is to be exposed every day to layers of
messages that become deeply internalised. These shape us. They shape our
sense of self. They shape how we see ourselves. They shape how we see
ourselves in relation to others. They shape how we see ourselves in
relation to the world around us. This is institutionalization. This is
indoctrination. This is oppression.

We are all individuals having individual experiences. If we cannot be
fully human without worrying what this means for us, if we cannot
experience the full range of our humanness, without worrying that there
might be something wrong, then we cannot be in the world in a manner
that is safe.

To this day, all these years later, enormous ongoing effort is required
to go against, to undo, these internalized messages. Some days, to walk
in the world, while habitually looking over my shoulder, requires a lot
of energy … and FFS it requires a lot of grit and courage. It feels as
though this grit and courage is invisible to most people … how can it
not be?


          *There is a growing international community who are creating
          safe spaces where those suffering with emotional distress can
          be seen, heard, acknowledged and validated.*

/Karin:/ The dialogue here isn’t turning towards peers and that is
deeply disturbing to me. There is still such a deep distrust for those
who have suffered and survived psychiatry, withdrawal, and emotional
distress. This creates yet more space in this void of the story of
suffering for those who have no idea what it actually means to survive
it to dictate treatment for it.

If there is anything I would like to see from this space that is open to
new voices around the cause of mental distress since the Moncrieff et al
paper, it is that peers, activists, and critical psychiatry voices get
the say they deserved all along. We have been silenced long enough.

/Marnie:/ People are seeing through the illusions. They’re seeing the
disconnects. They’re asking questions. The dominance of the biomedical
narrative is fraying, fragmenting, breaking down. The flimsiness of this
“neuromythology” is becoming increasingly apparent. The false nature of
these things that have been widely sold as discrete, discernable “mental
illnesses” is being seen for what it is, by more people than ever before.

Our human condition is anything but tidy. To be fully human is to
accept, even embrace, the chaos that is inevitable, and essential to
negotiating the messy terrain of daily living. Being ourselves without
fear of reprisal, without fear that any part of who and how we are will
be medicalized or pathologized, is essential to wellbeing. For me,
living with my grief, my internal chaos, the thoughts and feelings that
are challenging for me (and sometimes others) has been made that much
more bearable by the international community of like-minded people ….
those of us who fully inhabit our humanness.


          *Conclusion*

For six decades, a highly effective propaganda campaign sold the
chemical imbalance theory to millions of people all over the world.
Whether psychiatry believed it matters little when juxtaposed against
the countless lives that have been damaged by the myth of the chemical
imbalance.

An uncritical acceptance of the dominant biomedical narrative by health
care systems and providers, the media, and Joe & Josephine Citizen, has
enabled what Paulo Freire called a “pedagogy of the oppressed.” The
oppressors and the oppressed are blinded to a vicious cycle of
oppression. Feeling states that are not happy and/or peaceful have
become widely rejected aberrations. Tolerance of suffering has become
diminished to the point that any despair, fear, or states of distress
and internal chaos have become “symptoms of disorder.”

This widely adopted, societally constructed belief, enabled intolerance
of suffering as well as a form of social control. Restricting the full
range of emotions that are part of the human condition, through the
psychiatric/pharmaceutical paradigm, has created strict rules of which
emotions are “good” and which are “bad.” The psychiatric survivor
movement brings forth the idea that all emotions, held safely and
together, can lead to healing.

If you now realize you are one of the countless lives that have been
damaged and you are feeling betrayed and overwhelmed by grief and loss,
know that the psychiatric survivor network is here to help you heal.

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