Matt sings A Little More on Pathways Drop In Center
Everyday heroes are individuals who use their talents to help persons with mental illnesses. I believe in the power of an individual to not only change another person’s life for the better, but also to help change society. In this blog and a few to follow, I am putting a spotlight on several everyday heroes who are making a difference.
Let’s begin with Matt Shenk, Nelson Kull, and Mary Leaphart.
I first heard Matt Shenk sing at a Crisis Intervention Team training award ceremony in Orlando, Florida, and I was impressed by his voice (think John Mayer) and the original song that he’d written specifically for Pathways Drop In Center.
A Little More is a poignant song about people in need. Matt cares about mental illness because his mother had schzophrenia. Pathways used his song as the soundtrack on a promotional video that it produced.
Please take a moment to watch it (above) because I promise that you will be blown away by Matt’s voice and words. [He deserves a shot on America’s Got Talent or American Idol!] You can learn more about Matt at his webpage and facebook page.
The video also will introduce you to J. Nelson Kull III, who founded Pathways Drop In Center in 1993, and is the driving force behind it. The center is completely run and governed by persons who have a mental health diagnosis. Nelson has schzophrenia, often described as the worst mental illness, yet he and his all volunteer staff run one one of the best drop in centers that I’ve ever visited and no one works harder to raise money for Pathways and speak on the behalf of its members than Nelson does, all without pay. He is a spark plug who never stops advocating and his vision and determination to found and keep Pathways going is inspiring. 
Mary Leaphart was diagnosed with clinical depression in 2000 and put on medication. Turns out, she had been misdiagnosed and received the wrong treatment for about seven years. Her treatment not only didn’t help her get better, it made things worst. With fierce determination, Mary took charge of her recovery, found a better doctor and was finally correctly diagnosed with Bipolar II. Like most, she struggled for several years, burning through different jobs and relationships, but she finally was able, as she put it, “to sort it all out.””
“I am still, and always will be, on the road to recovery,” Mary told me, “but I reached a point where I felt it finally was time to share my story in big way.”
Mary decided to share her bipolar journey with its joys, sorrows, dark side and humor by writing original songs and short stories about “the reality – not the misconception, not the stigma, not the stereotype – but the reality of life with a mental illness.”
ALMOST TOGETHER is a one woman, sixty minute show that Mary will perform six times beginning July 13th and running until July 28th at the Capitol Fringe Festival, which was founded in 2005 in Washington D.C. to give lesser known artists the opportunity to display their talents. You can learn more about Mary’s one act show by visiting her facebook page.
Writing and singing songs about mental illness, founding a drop in center, and daring to appear before live audiences talking about your journey through madness are dramatic examples of how individuals can use their talents to help others.
I salute them and hope you will visit their websites and support their efforts.
Next up on Monday: a photographer who documents the hell that I discovered when I investigated how jails and prisons have become our new mental asylums, a church singer performs a song about her son’s illness, and my friend Pat Milam works with a cartoonist to expose flaws in our system.
NOTE FROM PETE: A glinch in our website caused several comments posted about this blog to be deleted and others to appear with my photo even though they were written by other readers. We are working to correct this problem. Thanks for your patience.
About the author:
Three incredible individuals giving so much of themselves so that others can find hope. Great post, Pete.
“Mary took charge of her recovery, found a better doctor and was finally correctly diagnosed with Bipolar II.”
Well, Mary went from worse to worser, I believe. Isn’t it the case, as Tom Insel pointed out in his now famous post, that “depression” is just as made up as “bipolar”? Which blood, biopsy or imaging tests was Mary given to be sure that this time “bipolar” is the right label to describe whatever mental state she was going through? The question is obviously rhetorical. And for those in NAMI-land who don’t know what I am talking about, the answer is NONE. No biological tests whatsoever. That would not prevent the so called “doctor” from prescribing drugs to treat the invented disease.
Let’s stop promoting this pseudoscience. Psychiatry has ruined more lives than we can count, and that would include, probably, Mary’s who as a result of the drugs will have a side effects that will last for the rest of her entire life.
Cannotsay
What happened to you is tragic, but one person’s
mistreatment is exactly that. one person’s story. I am not aware of any credible statistical data that would support your charge that psychiatry has ruined more lives than it has helped.
Sweeping broadsides, whether they are lobbed at NAMI,
psychiatry, the Church of Scientology, or Mad In America are emotionally driven rhetoric that add nothing to a serious conversation about what is wrong with our health care system.
It is well-known that there are no medical tests that will confirm that an individual has a mental disorder. This is why the DSM was created. It is symptom driven manual and therefore ripe for errors. Dr. Tom
Insel never suggested that mental illnesses are not real. This is what he wrote in his director’s blog.
·
“A diagnostic approach based on the biology as well as the
symptoms must not be constrained by the current DSM categories,
Mental disorders are biological disorders involving brain
circuits that implicate specific domains of cognition, emotion, or behavior,
Each level of analysis needs to be understood across a
dimension of function,
Mapping the cognitive, circuit, and genetic aspects of
mental disorders will yield new and better targets for treatment.”
The idea that mental illnesses do not exist because there is no medical test that detects them is an old anti-psychiatry bromide. Have you ever come into contact with anyone who is severely mentally ill?
You have posted numerous comments on Pete’s blog that all
say the same thing. Please don’t assume that you are omniscient and that anyone else’s experience or opinion is a fraudulent if it doesn’t support your point of view.
Finally,if you don’t have anything new to say, give us a break and wait until you do before you post another comment that is repetitive .
For some technical reason, I cannot post the answer to Mary Margaret in the right place, so I’ll put it here.
Mary Margaret,
I am happy that you are willing to engage in a
debate. This is something that the average NAMI member, in my own
personal experience, is unwilling to do.
You ask whether there
are statistics to back the claim that psychiatry has ruined more lives
than it has helped. There are. I am able to document each and every
single one of them with a link, but I am not doing it now because Pete,
in an effort to prevent spamming, moderates comments with links. I’ll be
happy to provide them. Here are the facts,
– 2 Meta studies
performed on the data submitted by the drug companies to the FDA, and
obtained through FOIA requests, prove very convincingly that SSRIs are
not better than placebos to treat so called “depression”. These studies
were published at the New England Journal of Medicine by EH Turner and
PLOS medicine by Irving Kirsch. Last month, EH Tuner published a more
comprehensive study that showed that so called “publication bias” is
pervasive in other areas of psychiatry, not only SSRIs. The recent EH
Turner study was highlighted in MIA recently. The conclusion of this is
that millions of people have been given medications that only work as
active placebos causing all kinds of secondary effects that result in
real diseases such as increased cholesterol levels, etc.
– In
May 2013, the CDC published the data that between 1999 and 2009, a time
when more Americans have been taking antidepressants than ever, the
suicide rate (ie, THE RATE) per 100000 increased by 30 %. This is
consistent with the finding that SSRIs increase the propensity of people
to commit violence against themselves or others (finding that was
already known by Elli Lilly even before the approval of Prozac as the
Standard Gravure shooting lawsuits showed).
– In 2012, GSK
settled for 3 billion dollars with the US Department of Justice that it
had promoted the use of drugs off label. This included hundreds of
millions of dollars to settle CRIMINAL charges for promoting Paxil off
label on children with fake studies like Study 329 and bribing
psychiatrists such as Martin Keller. GSK knew that not only it was
ineffective in treating so called “depression” in children but that it
increased suicidal behavior in those children taking it. Why is that
nobody went to jail for this is beyond me, but the fact remains that GSK
settled criminal charges for this matter.
The DSM was created
to pathologize behavior psychiatrists do not like, not SYMPTOMS, via a
vote. This is why homosexuality was first a mental illness, then it was
not. Or why with DSM-III being sad up to one year for the death of a
loved one was OK, but DSM-IV said that beyond 2 months that was
depression and DSM-5 says that beyond 2 weeks that is depression. Each
time the decision was made via a vote and, conveniently, expanded the
number of people eligible for an antidepressant prescription.
This
is not how science works. Science is an utterly undemocratic endeavor.
It’s all about falsifiable predictions and reproducibility. Do do I
know? Because I am a scientist. The type of science I work in, and I do
not conceive any other type of science, makes planes fly, computers work
and cures cancer. Without a biological marker for any of the DSM
invented diseases, DSM diagnoses remain value judgements by DSM
committee members about what behaviors they like and which behaviors
they don’t. In that regard, they are closer to the Inquisition who made
similar judgements based on their own bible.
I never said that
Tom Insel said that mental illness doesn’t exist. That was an strawman
on your side. What he said, and I am quoting here (emphasis mine),
“While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best,
a dictionary, CREATING -my note, ie, INVENTING-a set of labels and defining each. The strength
of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has
ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The
WEAKNESS IS ITS LACK OF VALIDITY. Unlike our definitions of ischemic
heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a
consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective
laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to
creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the
quality of fever.”
That
is a statement of fact. Then Insel goes on to express “belief” that his
research program will be able to find biomarkers in the future. But,
while his first part is a statement about FACTS, the second part is
WISHFUL THINKING.
See, the difference between you, Pete, the
average NAMI member and myself is that I have a scientific background
and I do real science for a living. The type of thinking that passes as
“good” in psychiatry would have the members of my profession expelled
from the ranks. The ability of psychiatry to impose its belief system as
“science” is another of the unfortunate effects of having the vast
majority of Americans as scientifically illiterate.
I want to add that the original post now shows removed by a moderator. I am keeping it for my own records though.
Cannotsay
What happened to you is tragic, but one person’s
mistreatment
is exactly that. one person’s story. I am not aware of any credible statistical
data that would support your charge that psychiatry has ruined more lives than
it has helped.
Sweeping broadsides, whether they are lobbed at NAMI,
psychiatry, the
Church of Scientology, or Mad In America are emotionally driven rhetoric that
add nothing to a serious conversation about what is wrong with our health care
system.
It is well-known that there are no medical tests that will confirm that an
individual has a mental disorder. This is why the DSM was created. It is symptom
driven manual and therefore ripe for errors. Dr. Tom
Insel never suggested
that mental illnesses are not real. This is what he wrote in his director’s
blog.
·
“A diagnostic approach based on the biology as well as
the
symptoms must not be constrained by the current DSM categories,
Mental
disorders are biological disorders involving brain
circuits that implicate
specific domains of cognition, emotion, or behavior,
Each level of analysis
needs to be understood across a
dimension of function,
Mapping the
cognitive, circuit, and genetic aspects of
mental disorders will yield new
and better targets for treatment.”
The idea that mental illnesses do not exist because there is no medical test
that detects them is an old anti-psychiatry bromide. Have you ever come into
contact with anyone who is severely mentally ill?
You have posted numerous comments on Pete’s blog that all
say the same
thing. Please don’t assume that you are omniscient and that anyone else’s
experience or opinion is a fraudulent if it doesn’t support your point of view.
Mary Margaret
Mary,
Glad you re-posted this. I replied to you above. I think that your position, which boils down to defending human rights abuses in the name of a quackery, is untenable. What Tom Insel said was to make it publicly known what every psychiatrist knew to be true.
Dear cannot say,
I am grateful that my earlier comments finally made it out of mediation.
You wrote that psychiatry has harmed more people than it has helped. I asked you to prove it. You responded with articles about shameful behavior by pharmaceutical companies and studies that questioned the effectiveness of SSRIs.
While clearly disturbing, none of the studies that you mentioned support your claim that psychiatry is quackery. You have not come up with any statistic evidence that would show that a thousand people who went to see psychiatrists were worst off after that experience than a thousand who had not gone to see them.
Instead, you are and continue to make, much like the anti-psychiatry forces in the Church of Scientology, wide sweeping attacks that are based on your personal beliefs and prejudices rather than facts.
You dismissed Dr. Tom Insel’s theory that serious mental illnesses are biological in nature with some probable genetic link as wishful thinking, yet you provide no credible evidence that Insel’s hypothesis is wrong. Rather you simply mouth more rhetoric.
You write that you are a scientist, as if this profession gives your thoughts and statements more validity. Need I remind you that scientists once preached the world was flat.
As I noted in my first post, what happened to you is tragic but it remains your story and your’s alone and does not give you any special insights nor authority beyond the telling of it.
–Mary Margaret
Mary Margaret,
With all due respect, you have it backwards. What differentiates science from fairy tales or pseudo science is the ability of making falsifiable predictions that can be verified empirically and reproduced.In other words, if psychiatry wants to be considered a science it has to be able to make this type of predictions. It is not “I claim to be a science and you have to prove otherwise”.
I could claim that so called “mental illness” is caused by mystic waves generated by unicorns living in Mars -in caves that have not been yet explored by humans- and, with the evidence at hand, that theory is as valid as biopsychiatry.
The reason why we take Einstein’s theory of general relativity as valid is because it made accurate predictions (that could be false if the theory was wrong, that is the “falsifiability” aspect) and turned out to be true repeatedly. Because it would be moderated, I am not posting the link but I ask you to Google “Tests of general relativity” to learn about the details.
Biopsychiatry is a fairy tale, a “story”. Nothing else. There isn’t the slightest scientific evidence to back it. And that is the point that Tom Insel agrees to.
Finally, I find it particularly insulting that your only response is to suggest that I am affiliated with the Church of Scientology. I am not. That “attack the messenger” line of defense doesn’t work. It never worked, but tin the after Insel provoked crisis works even less.
And as to being anti psychiatry, I consider that as a compliment, as good as when those who opposed slavery were called “anti slavery”. Nothing wrong with it. Psychiatry is a quackery that has ruined more lives than we can count. The CDC data supports the notion that SSRIs have pushed many people to take their own lives. That is both a tragedy and a crime.