We see a lot of news articles cropping up warning about stress during holidays. Personally, we think a lot of it is motivated by some marketer’s bright idea, no doubt under the guidance of an “expert” psychologist or psychiatrist, about how to drum up business for the mental health industry.
Of course, you know what an “expert” is? An “ex” is a has-been; and a “spurt” is a drip under pressure.
Sometimes the advice given is just common sense; but other times the advice is dangerous. Beware, judgment may be in short supply when under a lot of stress.
One source wants us to “seek help from a healthcare professional.” Naturally; the marketer in action.
One psychologist recommends you seek help from the American Psychological Association. Naturally.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services has a full-color brochure on how to handle holiday stress. They recommend, surprise, that you call the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s Crisis Intervention line.
Oh, and then there’s all the “research” about holiday stress. The Mayo Clinic thinks women tend to get more stressed during the holiday season. We’re pretty sure that a comprehensive search will find that some scientist, somewhere has reached pretty much any conclusion you care to name about this condition.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has several entries for a fraudulent diagnosis of stress as a mental illness, for which you can be prescribed a harmful and addictive psychoactive drug: – Acute stress disorder – Unspecified trauma- and stressor-related disorder – Other specified trauma- and stressor-related disorder – Posttraumatic stress disorder We’re pretty sure you already know our opinion about the DSM. With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a “mental illness” simply by adding the term “disorder” onto them.
There are even articles about “stress-free recipes for the holidays”.
Our advice? Read what we have to say about stress, pass this along to your family, friends and associates, let us know what you think about this, and then have a happy, safe, stress-free holiday!
Hope is the desire that sometime in the future, one will cease to have something which is no longer wanted but one can’t seem to get rid of (like a chronic pain), or that one will acquire something wanted.
“Going On Hoping” is the condition where one continues to hope in spite of no possibility of realizing one’s goal, particularly when one is not actively involved in realizing the goal.
Giving something a lick and a promise and hoping it will somehow be all right stems from laziness and stupidity. I hope that doesn’t offend anyone.
The better alternative is to control one’s environment by doing things well and thoroughly, leading to one’s goals.
The Psychiatric Way
Psychiatrists speak about “adaptation to one’s environment” as the way to handle Life. One of the primary ways psychiatric treatment attempts to adapt one to one’s environment is with drugs, which reduce or block restimulative stimuli by deadening the perceptive abilities of the central nervous system.
Many psychiatric studies on the topic emphasize how one’s environment, over which one apparently has little control, influences or controls one’s troubles. Toxins and contaminants in the environment; stress in the environment; one’s genes; one’s community and its social factors; the climate; PTSD; crime and other violent or dangerous situations in the environment; endemic systemic pandemic polemics.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatry’s billing bible, promotes these environmental factors against which one supposedly cannot fight back as the diagnostic criteria showing the presence of a “mental disorder”. One such is the diagnosis of “Victim of crime.”
Of course, one can certainly find situations where it is helpful to adapt to an environment. Think of wearing a protective suit in a hostile environment such as outer space or under water.
We don’t minimize these environmental factors, which have been found to be major contributors to mental stress and trauma. Rather, we point out that the common psychiatric point of view is to only find ways a person can adapt to such stress, when there might also be ways to exert more control over the environmental factors and adapt the environment to oneself. There are even terms to describe this psychiatric viewpoint, such as “stress-adapted children”; meaning that they have learned how to adapt to stress in their environments.
In fact, the data indicate that drug treatment is not usually necessary if a proper interpersonal environment and social context is provided as alternatives to psychiatry.
The Better Alternative
It has also been found that if one knows the technology of how to do something and can do it, and uses it, he cannot be the adverse effect of it. So for example in the matters under discussion here, the more one knows about something in the environment, and the more one can handle and control that, the less bad effects it can cause one. This leads to the insight that the more one can adapt the environment to oneself, instead of only adapting oneself to the environment, then the less the environment can harm one.
One may exclaim all kinds of ifs, ands and buts in the matter. But the fact remains that it behooves one to find out more about whatever the trouble is, and search diligently for ways to influence or control that.
Recommendations
CCHR recommends various strategies to proactively cope with psychiatric fraud or abuse, an environmental stress to which one may be subjected. For example:
Don’t suddenly stop taking a psychiatric drug as it may have withdrawal side effects; consult a competent non-psychiatric health care provider and find out how to withdraw safely.
We speak and write often about mental trauma, and how and why psychiatry is not the answer to good mental health care. But we rarely address exactly what mental health is. There are continuous loads of social commentary about mental health without even clearly defining what is good mental health.
We’ll try to remedy that. There are a number of useful approaches to defining good mental health. As usual with most English terms, there are multiple definitions; but we can certainly isolate some common attributes and characteristics. One can delineate both positive and negative characteristics; one can list contributing factors toward good mental health, and alternatively one can list contributing factors toward bad mental health.
WHO Says What is Mental Health
The World Health Organization (WHO) describes mental health as: “a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”
For a practical approach, this is a good start.
Additional Approaches to What is Mental Health
We might also call good mental health an absence of psychoses, neuroses, compulsions, repressions, and psychosomatic ills; leading to a state of mental well-being.
The Wales Mental Health in Primary Care Network has an interesting viewpoint of good mental health: “The central role of relationships in health and wellbeing suggests that relationships set the initial conditions and the simple values that lead to the emergence of health and wellbeing outcomes. Relationships that are positive between people and within organisations are the simple small inputs that lead to the much bigger output of improved outcomes and health gain. … The gold standard for mental health and wellbeing is the gold standard for caring relationships.”
Green Mental Health Care
“Green Mental Health Care is based on the preservation and treatment of the mind and body (for they are not separate functions) using non-toxic, non-addictive, and non-invasive strategies that produces good mental health. Green Mental Health Care has not only proven to be superior in patient outcomes than any other treatment method, including the use of psychiatric drugs, but it achieves the patient’s health goals at a fraction of the cost while saving them from the life-threatening health risks associated with psychiatric drugs.”
What is a Cure?
We generally take cure to mean the elimination of some unwanted condition with some effective treatment. The primary purpose of any mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance, leading to a cure. The only effective measure of this treatment must be “patients recovering and being sent, sane, back into society as productive individuals.” This, we would call a cure. Psychiatry produces no cures, which they readily admit.
“We do not know the causes [of any mental illness]. We don’t have the methods of ‘curing’ these illnesses yet.” [Dr. Rex Cowdry, psychiatrist and director of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1995] “The time when psychiatrists considered that they could cure the mentally ill is gone. In the future the mentally ill have to learn to live with their illness.” [Norman Satorius, president of the World Psychiatric Association in 1994]
The Effects of Stress
According to top experts, the majority of people having mental problems are actually suffering from non-psychiatric disorders, which can cause emotional stress. We might characterize mental stress as inorganic or organic. Organic conditions are characterized by physical and biochemical indicators, while inorganic conditions manifest only as distressing experiences or undesirable behavior. In either case, an underlying cause would be some form of stress.
An individual’s health level, sanity level, activity level and ambition level are all monitored by their own concept of the dangerousness of their environment. You are as successful as you adjust your environment to yourself, rather than the environment enforcing itself on you which produces stress.
Human Rights and Mental Health
Mental health refers to psychological, social, behavioral, and emotional aspects of health.
“The right to health contains both freedoms and entitlements. Freedoms include the right to control one’s health, including the right to be free from non-consensual medical treatment and experimentation. Entitlements include the right to a system of health protection (i.e. health care and the underlying social determinants of health) that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the highest attainable standard of health.”
The highest attainable standard of mental health care “includes the provision of equal and timely access to basic preventive, curative, rehabilitative health services and health education; regular screening programmes; appropriate treatment of prevalent diseases, illnesses, injuries and disabilities, preferably at community level; the provision of essential drugs; and appropriate mental health treatment and care.”
What is a Good Patient Outcome?
When we think about the outcomes of mental health care, we can think in terms that are important to the patient, or alternatively in terms that are important to others such as family, teachers, insurance companies, or the attending medical professionals.
A good patient outcome is one that leads toward optimum survival for the patient and all their associations.
The Highest Attainable Standard of Mental Health
It should be obvious by now that the term “mental health” has multiple effective meanings. It should also be obvious that psychiatry is not engaged in good mental health care, so the highest attainable standard of mental health would certainly eliminate psychiatric involvement.
The Bottom Line? Pick one or more of the above standards for good mental health and apply it to your own situations and interests; use them to guide your activities toward a higher standard. After all, good mental health is not a fixed state; one can always aspire and work toward a better state.
Pandemic, Lockdowns, Social Distancing, Masks, Vaccinations, Racism, Injustice, War, Pollution, Debt, Drugs, Illiteracy, Terrorism, Ignorance, Enslavement, School Shootings, Elderly Abuse, Foster Care Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Religious Intolerance, Political Abuse, Fake News, Psychiatry
Many people are not only convinced that the environment is dangerous, but that it is steadily growing more so. For many, it’s more of a challenge than they feel up to. An “environmental challenge” exists in an area which is filled with irrationality. While we thrive on a challenge, we can also be overwhelmed by a challenge to which we cannot respond.
What is dangerousness? Something one is afraid to communicate with. So if you say, “Don’t communicate with this,” then people will think it is dangerous. There are real areas of danger in the environment, but there are also areas being made to seem more dangerous than they really are. For example, recent events stress the “dangerousness” of the environment — and the arguments about masks, social distancing and vaccinations are rampant. This leads to all sorts of wrong targets, designed as red herrings to distract one from the real threats.
The fact of the matter is that the environment is made to appear much more dangerous than it actually is. A great number of people are professional dangerous environment makers; we might call them Merchants of Chaos or Merchants of Fear. This includes professions which require a dangerous environment for their continued existence, because they make their living off of it — such as the politician, the policeman, the newspaperman, the undertaker, the terrorist, the psychiatrist, and others.
These people sell a dangerous environment. That is their mainstay. They feel that if they did not sell people on the idea that the environment is dangerous, they would promptly go broke. So it is in their interest to make the environment seem far more dangerous than it actually is. This kind of misinformation is itself a clear and present danger to our personal safety.
How to Help Someone Overwhelmed by a Dangerous Environment
Here are four steps to take with someone to help spread some calm into a supposedly Dangerous Environment:
1. Write down the various problems one has.
2. Pick the one of these which is the easiest to confront and write that one down. (Confront is the ability to directly face without flinching.)
3. For that last one, write down some one thing you are absolutely sure you could do about it.
4. Do it.
The Psychiatric Connection
Daily, we see the news that people’s “mental health” is suffering because of the restrictions and fears of COVID-19, not unrealistic given the staggering changes to their lives. However, psychiatrists and psychologists are turning this natural response into a global mental disorder that will line their pockets from the funds they are demanding to “treat” it, usually with harmful and addictive psychotropic drugs.
Wherever psychiatry intervenes, the environment becomes more dangerous, more unsettled, more disturbed. PTSD, ADHD, Depression, Bipolar, Schizophrenia, on and on — psychiatry thrives on making people think they are sick; otherwise there would be no psychiatric patients, there would be no need for psychiatry.
A wide variety of environmental stresses can contribute to the onset of mental trauma. People can have mental trauma in their lives; but the treatment is not psychiatry or psychiatric drugs. The treatment is finding out what is really wrong, and then finding out that something can be done about it, and then doing something about it. Actually, if you knew what the problem really was, you would already have fixed it; so the “finding out” steps are essential. Psychiatry entirely skips the “finding out” steps; it just prescribes a drug to deaden the pain.
It used to be that the term “mentally ill” was limited to mean crazy people like those talking to themselves in the streets and those acting irrationally, oblivious to the world around them. However, the symptoms of mental illness today have been re-defined and broadened by psychiatry, and enshrined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), to fit under the umbrella of any non-optimum behavior, including what is considered normal for that age. Basically, “mentally ill” now is just an opinion about something that a psychiatrist doesn’t like.
This, in turn, allows for wholesale diagnoses of everything from “teenage moodiness” to “bad at mathematics”, followed by treatment with dangerous and addictive mind-altering drugs with harmful side effects. It would make more sense to look and see where the symptoms are coming from and check out things such as diet, allergies, infections, toxic things in the environment, illiteracy, etc.
The psychiatrization of normal everyday behavior by including personality quirks and traits is a lucrative business for the psychiatrist, because by expanding the number of “mental illnesses” even ordinary people can become patients and added to the psychiatric marketing pool.
Safe and effective medical treatments for mental difficulties are often kept buried. The fact is, there are many medical conditions that when undetected and untreated can appear as psychiatric “symptoms.” The psychiatric pharmaceutical industry is making a killing — $84 billion per year — based on people being labeled with mental disorders that are not founded on science or medicine, but on marketing campaigns designed to sell drugs.
An individual’s health level, sanity level, activity level and ambition level are all monitored by theirown concept of the dangerousness of the environment. You are as successful as you adjust your environment to yourself, rather than the environment enforcing itself on you. Find something in your environment that isn’t being a threat. It will calm you down.
Find Out About The Psychiatric Assault on America! Fight Back!
CCHR STL wishes all its supporters a healthy, happy, prosperous life and extraordinary mental health; holidays and new years notwithstanding.
Around holidays, the psychiatric industry typically promotes lots of media about holiday stress. We’ve written about stress previously; particularly about holiday stress.
There are even scholarly research articles about it: “Urban legend suggests that psychopathology tends to increase around the holidays.” You don’t have to agree with this.
We see a lot of news articles cropping up warning about stress during holidays.
Personally, we think a lot of it is motivated by some marketer’s bright idea, no doubt under the guidance of an “expert” psychologist or psychiatrist, about how to drum up business for the mental health industry.
Of course, you know what an “expert” is? An “ex” is a has-been; and a “spurt” is a drip under pressure.
Sometimes the advice given is just common sense; but other times the advice is dangerous. Beware, judgment may be in short supply when under a lot of stress.
The Missouri Magazine thinks it is essential to let us know this holiday season how to manage stress. Its advice is mostly common sense.
Medical News Today wants us to manage stress, also, but they recommend you “seek help from a healthcare professional.” Naturally; the marketer in action.
One psychologist recommends you seek help from the American Psychological Association. Naturally.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services even has a full-color brochure on how to handle holiday stress. They recommend, surprise, that you call the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s Crisis Intervention line.
Oh, and then there’s all the “research” about holiday stress. The Mayo Clinic thinks women tend to get more stressed during the holiday season. We’re pretty sure that a comprehensive search will find that some scientist, somewhere has reached pretty much any conclusion you care to name about this condition.
The DSM-V has several entries for stress: – Acute stress disorder – Unspecified trauma- and stressor-related disorder – Other specified trauma- and stressor-related disorder – Posttraumatic stress disorder We’re pretty sure you already know our opinion about the DSM.
There are even articles about “stress-free recipes for the holidays”.
Our advice? Read what we have to say about stress, pass this along to your family, friends and associates, let us know what you think about this, and then have a happy, safe, stress-free holiday!
anxiety: A sense of apprehension, uneasiness, or fear often over an impending or anticipated ill — from Latin anxius “troubled, uneasy”.
The mental health (aka psychiatric) community is all over this, warning Americans about election stress deteriorating into depression and salivating over the number of anti-depressant prescriptions they can write.
Many people are not only convinced that the environment is dangerous, but that it is steadily growing more so. For many, it’s more of a challenge than they feel up to. An “environmental challenge” exists in an area filled with irrationality. While we thrive on a challenge, we can also be overwhelmed by a challenge to which we cannot respond.
A wide variety of environmental stresses can contribute to the onset of anxiety. Find something in your environment that isn’t being a threat. It will calm you down.
The answer to this anxiety and stress is, of course, direct action. Take some positive action over which you have some small measure of control — write a letter to the editor; write a letter to your local, state and federal representatives; contribute time or money to a worthwhile cause; take some self-improvement course.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the billing bible of the mental health care industry, names stress explicitly as a billable diagnosis: Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders (an entire chapter in DSM-5); including various manifestations of PTSD, acute stress disorder, adjustment disorders, and reactive attachment disorder.
Their answer, however, is not action — it is drugs. They even have a class of drugs specifically marketed for this, called anti-anxiety drugs. These drugs come with side effect; one of the side effects is more anxiety. Other side effects can be hallucinations, delusions, confusion, aggression, violence, hostility, agitation, irritability, depression, and suicidal thinking. These are also some of the most difficult drugs to withdraw from.
We would like to make it very clear that ANXIETY and STRESS ARE NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS! They are the reaction to a stressor, something over which you have no control. The answer is to find something over which you do have some measure of control, and take action on it.
One of the more common American causes of anxiety is hypoglycemia. Yes, mental anxiety is one of the symptoms of low blood sugar, which is usually caused by consuming too much sugar.
So, if you are feeling down about the election, forego that self-indulgent donut and write your congressman instead!
Our research leading to the recent newsletter on Marijuana turned up many references to “stress” — the relief of stress by smoking pot; the stress caused by not having access to pot; the tension caused by opposing points of view on the use of pot; myriad stress-relief programs; the stress caused by adverse reactions, side effects and withdrawal symptoms of pot-smoking.
We thought it would be appropriate, therefore, to write about the subject of stress. It is obviously a term of great interest to psychiatry as well. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the billing bible of the mental health care industry, names it explicitly as a billable diagnosis.
Acute Stress Disorder (308.3, DSM-IV)
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (309.81, DSM-IV)
Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders (an entire chapter in DSM-5); including various manifestations of PTSD, acute stress disorder, adjustment disorders, and reactive attachment disorder.
There are even “DSM-5 Self-Exam Questions” with which you can diagnose yourself for stress-related symptoms.
Then there is ICD-10, the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision. This is a coding of diseases and signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances and external causes of injury or diseases, as classified by the World Health Organization. ICD-10 has its own classification of various stressors such as phobias, anxieties, adjustment disorders, and so on. The deadline for the United States to begin using Clinical Modification ICD-10-CM for diagnosis coding is currently October 1, 2014.
Let’s go over the basics, the dictionary definitions of the word “stress.” There are many; here are some:
a state of mental tension and worry caused by problems in life or work
something that causes strong feelings of worry or anxiety
physical force or pressure
a constraining force or influence
the burden on one’s emotional or mental well-being created by demands or difficulties
[from Middle English stresse stress, distress, hardship, short for destresse which is from Anglo-French destresce, from Latin districtus, past participle of distringere to grip with force, to draw tight]
“Acute stress response” was first described by Walter Cannon in the 1920s as a theory that animals react to threats with a general discharge of the sympathetic nervous system. The response was later recognized as the first stage of a general adaptation syndrome that regulates stress responses among vertebrates and other organisms (from Wikipedia.)
Here are some additional terms and phrases associated with the concept of stress that one might consider as either causes or symptoms:
suppression on one or more parts of one’s life
boredom
lack of a goal or purpose in life
exhaustion
overwhelm
physical or mental shock
exposure to someone antagonistic to oneself or one’s efforts
an accumulation in life of turmoil, distress, failure, pain, loss or injury
For comparison, here are some of the concepts encompassing opposites of stress (which we might generally just consider as an absence of stress):
survival
success
health
vitality
comfort
relaxation
We would like to make it very clear that STRESS IS NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS! It is the reaction to a stressor. It is not a deficiency of cannabis or Prozac, and cannot be fixed with a drug. It can only be fixed by finding and eliminating the causes of the stress. Notice we said “causes” plural; if you knew the one thing that was causing your stress, you would have already fixed it. Of course, there are many, many single things that, when found and fixed, could significantly reduce or eliminate those particular stressors.
Bodies also have their own forms of stress, for example chronic age-related diseases are linked to inflammation in the body; and oxidative stress occurs when the body is exposed to an excessive number of free radicals.
What’s keeping people from handling their stress?
Well, there are vested interests who want the general populace immobilized by stress. The psychopharmaceutical industry, for example.
Psychiatrists will not tell you that there are many safe and effective, non-psychiatric options for mental and emotional turmoil.
While life is full of problems, and those problems can sometimes be overwhelming, it is important to know that psychiatry, with its unscientific diagnoses and harmful treatments, are the wrong way to go. Their most common treatment, psychiatric drugs, only chemically mask problems and symptoms; they cannot and never will be able to solve life’s problems. Once the drug has worn off, the original problem remains, or may even deteriorate. Though psychiatrists classify their drugs as a solution to life’s problems, in the long run, they only make things worse.
According to top experts, the majority of people having mental problems are actually suffering from non-psychiatric disorders, which can cause emotional stress.
You can get a thorough physical examination from a competent medical—not a psychiatric—doctor to check for any underlying injury or illness that may be causing emotional distress.
It’s up to every individual to insist on it, and to insist on fully informed consent to any treatment.
We thought it would be appropriate, therefore, to write about the subject of stress. It is obviously a term of great interest to psychiatry as well. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (