Guardian and High Protector

Welcome to Guardian and High Protector.

My name is Jane and I consider myself a mental health advocate and psychiatric survivor. I am a former bipolar child who spent some time being force medicated living under the thumb of the State as a teen in residential treatment facilities and group homes. As a juvenile I was told by the mental health professionals in charge of my care that,

“You have a chemical imbalance in your brain. You have an incurable genetic disorder. You must be on a medication cocktail consisting of mood stabilizers and neuroleptics to treat it for the rest of your life. You have no choice.”

During the course of my early and mid-twenties I took a step back from having a ‘normal’ life and took up mind-body disciplines. I experienced a very slow but complete cure for my depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder symptoms over the course of about five years.

It was not until I turned thirty-one that I began to do research on my supposedly incurable genetic chemical imbalances that I no longer suffered from. That’s when I discovered that while I had been tuning out the world healing myself of my madness, the world had gone on without me. And these trends that I witnessed in the 90s had become full-blown panics by the early twenty-first century.

I personally witnessed the rise of the ADHD and bipolar disorder epidemics. I was part of it—as was my brother. I saw a gradual but steady increase in medicated kids during my time spent involuntarily in mental health services in the late 80s and early 90s. I experienced repeated pressure and coercion to go on and stay on medications. That pressure was and is still institutional-wide. If you are a teen and you act weird or get caught up in state services you will find yourself up against the same thing I was. But in a way, it’s much worse now.

When I was a teen, Prozac was the first blockbuster SSRI. If you were diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorder or anxiety in the early 90s they had a limited medicine chest. Lithium, Risperdal, Valium, Trilafon, Neurontin and Prozac were the big drugs then. That psychiatric drug pharmacopoeia has exploded in the last twenty years.

Whereas a child or teen back in my day might have been on one, two maybe four drugs at a time—adolescents these days are on a half dozen or more. From the so-called newer atypical antipsychotics like Abilify and Zyprexa to moodstabilizers like Depakote to antidepressants like Wellbutrin and Zoloft and many many others. These foster kids and wards of the state are covered under Medicaid. That means their prescribing doctors have a huge latitude to prescribe pretty much whatever they want—off label. Meaning, for uses the FDA has not approved of.

What we have learned in recent years is that antidepressants and antipsychotics do not correct any kind of imbalance.

The dopamine and serotonin chemical imbalance theories have been smashed into the ground and there is a smoking miles-wide crater where they used to exist. The fact is: SSRIs and neuroleptics actually create artificial imbalances of normal neurotransmitter pathways in the brain. Pathways that have been hardwired into us through the process of evolution. These medication induced imbalances continue to grow the longer you are on those drugs in a process called ‘iatrogenesis’.

The very organizations we assume would be looking out for us: APA, FDA, NAMI and NIMH are completely subverted by Big Pharma money and special interests, or nearly so. Those organizations work for the drug megacorps, not us consumers. So it is up to us to keep a watchful eye on them and inform each other.

In recent years I have developed several special interests of my own. Issues like:

• The diagnosis and treatment of child and pediatric bipolar disorder.
• Forced drugging of foster children, mainstream children and wards of the State.
• Psychotropic drug experimentation on children.
• Depression screening of teens and children.
• Depression screening of pregnant mothers.
• Coercing energetic and intelligent young boys into taking addictive meth-derived stimulant drugs to control their behavior at home or at school.

Here on this blog, those issues are frankly criminal offenses. These are wrong directions our society is taking.

It’s quite horrifying really if you think about it. Because invariably the treatments issued to people who are screened and diagnosed is drugs, drugs, and more drugs. The lip service paid to psychotherapy as being part of treatment is just that. It’s a matter of privilege if you can afford to play therapist roulette like you do with medications. For a great many people, if not most, this means that the ideal of therapy+meds is never realized—so they just get the drugs.

If I had my way—I would ban those practices from happening–right now. I would sign an executive order to that effect and Big Pharma stock points be damned.

The way I see it is—if you are an adult, and you are suffering from mental illness, then by all means go to a psychiatrist if you want to and scarf down as many pills as you like. You pay your money—you take your chances. As an adult, you have the ability to fact check on your own, if you don’t think your doctor knows enough about the meds he or she just prescribed to you. You can decide whether you want to take the risk. You have an adult level of judgment, an educated frontal lobe and reasoning center, to determine the risk-reward benefit to your self and your body over the short and long term.

Toddlers, young kids and teenagers simply can not make a well-considered risk-reward judgment for themselves on the matter. For a number of reasons. The most prevalent being—they are routinely lied to outright about what the drugs do and what side effect to expect from them. They do not have informed consent. Short and long term do not mean the same thing to young people either. Short term to a teen can be an hour or a day while long term could mean a week or a month. Adults tend to think of long term in months and years.

To be informed is to know things like: SSRIs cause imbalances, they don’t correct them. Informed consent means knowing that neuroleptics aka ‘nerve clamps’ cause brain shrinkage the longer you take them because they slowly kill off basal ganglion. If you don’t tell your child that they are taking addictive stims, brain shrinking bug killers or libido destroying mood stabilizers, then they are not fully informed and their consent or lack of is utterly meaningless.

Right now millions of adults are modeling for millions of children that the solution to any emotional or thought problem is to promptly medicate yourself out of experiencing it. Because that is what the television tells them to do. Kids tend to have an innate trust of their parents and teachers unless that trust is violated. Kids also generally have a desire to please the grown-ups in their life and get their approval. Thus, kids take the meds they are told to take—that they need to take—by their parents without really understanding why they are taking those drugs and what it means for their physical and mental and social development one year, five years, or twenty years down the line.

Most teens don’t know that in every state in America, upon reaching the age of fourteen, fifteen or sixteen they acquire the adult civil right of refusal of consent to medical treatment–and that it most certainly applies to taking psych meds.

As an observer, it seems to me like parents are either ignorant or willful accomplices in the coerced polypharmy drugging of their own offspring, without fully realizing the harm they are doing or allowing to happen. It seems to me, as an observer, that there is no proper advocate for these foster kids and alleged ADHD and bipolar children. An advocate for their interests could be someone that was actually one of them, that lived that experience and has some things to say about it. Someone like me.

That is what this blog is about. A former bipolar child speaking out against these machinations. This blog will serve notice to the round table panels and board meetings of the ivory tower academics and elite politicians in the current and future medical and mental health profession. To everyone who has medical or political influence over policy-making or is touted as being an ‘authority’ on the subject.

Dear E. Fuller Torrey, Joe Biederman, Kay Redfield Jamison, Jeffrey Lieberman, Judith Warner, Demitri and Janice Papolos et al:

Your actions, speeches and ideology finally spilled into my world and got my attention and now I am watching you. I know what you are doing and I am telling you all–this must end. Stop assisted (enforced) outpatient treatment orders now. No more Laura’s Law. No more Baker Acts.

Stop psychotropic drug testing on children now. Total ban on coercive psychiatric screening and drug treatment for minors and expecting mothers–right now. Not—earlier detection and sooner (drug) treatments (Biederman, Jamison, Papolos,).

Do it to yourselves. But not to the uninformed children whose brains and bodies are being ruined–enslaved to lifer multi-psychiatric drug addiction–simply because they had the misfortune and bad luck of getting caught up in your quest to pad your C.V. and get published.

My writings:

Meditation as a Cure for Mental Illness

The Myth of the Bipolar Child

Anatomy of an Epidemic, a review

Mad in America, a review

Bipolar Disorder Recovery in 12 Steps.

Big Pharma’s damaging drugs—a history of lies and deceit.

I will gladly talk about these issues, be it at an APA meeting or a Senate hearing. If you want to hear me speak about the criminal bipolar child-ADHD racket going on in this country–shoot me an electronic mail message: janealexander999 (at) yahoo dotcom