If you have an interest in schizophrenia, or just want to learn more about it, I would suggest reading this section of Dr. Breggin’s book.
The first chapter in this part details what schizophrenia is, specifically the symptoms of what the author calls a psychospiritual crisis, which is brought on by environmental factors, feelings of anger and overwhelm, feelings of humiliation, depression, and identity crisis, and not genetic factors as the psychiatry community would like us to believe. There is a lack of evidence to prove that schizophrenia has a genetic link, even though psychiatrists as a whole try to push this theory. Psychiatrists usually end up making symptoms worse by prescribing medications that end up making the condition worse.
The next chapter lists all the most popular drugs that are used to treat schizophrenia, both their scientific names and the name brands which they are sold under by various pharmaceutical companies. Psychiatric treatment revolves around these drugs and the prescribing of them to impair the ‘normal’ brain function of the patient, not to cure whatever is askew. Basically, psychiatric drugs are the chemical equivalent of a lobotomy, instead of surgically clippining the pathways between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain, these drugs chemically disrupt the path.
Following the chapter about drugs, is a chapter about the effects of long term drug use. I learned all about tardive dyskinesia and dementia, two diseases that are linked with persons who have taken psychiatric drugs for years. Taking narcoleptic drugs for even a few months could lead to health problems that could plague a person for the rest of their life. I also learned about the flu-like withdrawal symptoms that occur when a person stops taking narcoleptics.
The final chapter in part 1 points out how obvious it is that schizophrenia is the result of environmental factors, and not genetics. Psychiatrists push the genetic link as the cause of schizophrenia for many reasons, the most important being that they would likely lose their validity and their jobs. The second most important reason is that schizophrenics rarely reproduce and have a lot of difficulty doing so, due to spending a large portion of their lives in institutions, being isolated, trouble being social, and other mental health problems. If schizophrenia was genetic, it would not be as prevalent as it is, as there would not be enough diagnosed individuals producing children to keep the disease alive. This, for me, was the most interesting chapter.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 