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Dec. 15, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:31
2559 Nonconformity as Mental Illness - A Conversation with Dr. Dan Edmunds
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Good evening, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I have, for the second time, Dr.
Dan Edmonds, affiliated with the International Center for Humane Psychiatry.
No, it's not the oxymoron you're thinking of, and the European-American University.
Thank you so much, Dan, for taking the time today.
Yes, thank you.
So, you wrote recently on your blog, and there's sort of two things that I'd like to chat about.
Some of the skepticism that seems to be growing or mounting with regards to the medical, biochemical model of what has become modern psychiatry.
You have written recent statements from the National Institutes of Mental Health, in which mental health funding will not rely on the DSM-5 And the British Psychological Association's Clinical Psychology Division suggesting that we need to look at poverty, oppression, and abuse.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit.
There seems to be a lot of skepticism about DSM-5, a lot of stuff in the popular literature about how it seems to pathologize everything from nail-biting to thumb-sucking to watching too much TV or spending too much time on the Internet.
It seems like few of us are going to escape the mental health Right.
Well, what I see happening with each edition of the DSM is this process where This basic human experience is now being looked upon in a pathological way, and it's gradually increasing where I'm convinced that at some point in time, probably every person could be labeled with some supposed disorder.
But I do think that There are some, particularly coming from more of the humanistic side of things in psychology, that are beginning to really challenge that and say, okay, let's really look at this a minute.
And there's so many other factors that So we do have to look at poverty.
We do have to look at oppression.
We have to look at the experience of the individual as a whole and look at them not necessarily as a pathology, but sometimes just a simple reaction to the environments that they're in.
Yeah.
It also seems to me that there are a few things that, if we're going to start looking at pathological human behavior, It seems it's sort of typical middle-class neuroses, not to say that all of them are, but a lot of the new ones seem to be.
And of course, stuff which I, at least as an amateur, would recognize as the effects of poverty and oppression and abuse.
But if we look at the major destruction that has occurred, just say over the last five years in America, it has been warmongering and financial fraud, financial thumb jiggery, the psychotic destruction of 40% Oh, absolutely not.
the capacity to destroy a nation's wealth without conscience.
I mean, where are the really important pathologies that are actually harming the world?
They're not going to be there, and that's what I would argue too, is that this biopsychiatric model allows for institutions and individuals to be exonerated. is that this biopsychiatric model allows for institutions and individuals
So, they don't have to do anything to make any changes within the society at all, because that's not where they're looking at the change needing to come from.
Blame the brain of the person and say that all the other things that they may be experiencing are basically irrelevant.
And that's the frustrating thing to those of us, I assume that you're in this camp, to those of us who are trying to point out that society is not very healthy, the frustrating thing about this expansion of diagnoses of mental illnesses It's obviously tragic that people with legitimate suffering and problems are being labeled with some pseudo-medical model and being hit with pretty brain-wrecking drugs.
They're being told a lot of lies as well, and there's very grim prophecies made to some individuals, particularly those that I've worked with That have gone through extreme states of mind.
Usually they're told, well, you have something wrong with your brain and you're going to have to be a lifelong patient and you're going to have to take antipsychotic drugs forever.
And so it's a very grim...
message that they're giving.
But I have found in my work that it's very intense and it doesn't come overnight.
But yes, these people do go from breakdown to breakthrough.
It is possible.
And these drugs don't have to be a part of the picture.
The person doesn't have to be on them lifelong.
I've seen that happen.
Right.
And what is, to me, being diagnosed that is even more fundamentally wrong Is when we label huge amounts of people as mentally ill and give them huge amounts of drugs, I think what is the hidden diagnosis is that we're saying society is sane.
Like a failure to conform with society is a mental illness.
A failure to conform with the moral norms, if we can put it that way, of society is a problem.
And that, because the problem is always heaped upon and always labeled at, the person who is failing to conform to society...
Society is automatically defined as healthy.
And that seems to me very much against the origins of, I mean, certainly the origins of self-knowledge as far back as Socrates 2,500 years ago.
Socrates was routinely diagnosing an incredibly sick society.
And if you look at Freud's uncovering of rampant sexual abuse in the Viennese bourgeoisie in the late 19th century, what seemed to be revealed was that people were sick because they were hammered at Abused, thrown under the bus, exploited, or grew up with people who had very few resources or an excess of sadism or brutality, put in terrible schools, fed bad food, exposed to environmental toxins, and yet all of that vanishes.
And we say, well, you see, they're biochemical imbalance, and what we need to do is keep hitting them with medication until they end up at the home, and we'll call that success.
It's just mind-blowing.
Right, and so it's very interesting that they would even use the term recovery for those types of situations and that's what I find to be very sad is that those that get trapped into this model where they're basically told at best if they have a mediocre job and they're maintained on these drugs and just Basically getting by,
that means that they have improved, that that's success.
But I don't look at that as success at all.
I think that the persons can go way beyond that, and I've seen that happen.
And it's interesting to look at, too, that the person doing the diagnosing is automatically assumed that they are in this role of being sane.
That they are representing the society, almost as a priest, in a way, representing the society.
Yeah, I mean, it's fairly clear, if you look at something like the Salem witch hunts in Massachusetts, that their problem was not with witches.
Their problem was a profoundly sick and fundamentalist and superstitious society.
And some environmental toxins have been sort of theorized as well as part of the issue.
And also it struck me that since there are quite a lot of people who abuse children in society, I mean, even if we just take the legal definition, I sort of go a lot further and I think that spanking is abusive and I think there's lots of good data to support that in terms of its negative effects on children.
Things like, you know, putting Kids of babies of three months old are into daycare for 30 plus hours a week.
I consider that to be...
It's not abusive like people are trying to be mean.
It's just the effects tend to be extremely destructive.
But even if we just take the standard definition of child abuse, there are a lot of people out there, sadly, abusing their children.
And it would seem to me that psychiatry, the medical model, I shouldn't say all of psychiatry, the medical model extends a huge blanket, a huge camouflage, a huge cover.
For these people, because if a lot of emotional and psychological dysregulation arises from child abuse, not all, but a lot, then the medical model exonerates and covers up.
It's a camouflage for the people who are harming children by pointing out that, well, it's just like diabetes.
It's not like being mean to your children produces diabetes.
Oh, absolutely.
That's tragic.
Why would you want to do that?
When you have these children that are often labeled with so-called disruptive behavior disorders and so forth, many times that is what you are actually seeing happen is that these are children who have been traumatized many times.
These are children who have been mistreated and sometimes their families aren't even aware that they are mistreating them.
Instead of addressing those issues and saying, okay, there are these family dynamics that are very destructive.
We need to be dealing with that.
Instead, you set up a scapegoat.
The child becomes the scapegoat.
He's the one or she is the one who is labeled and becomes the focus of the so-called treatment.
And oftentimes what I've found is that when you have a child who is labeled and then you begin to really examine the family, if anyone is disturbing, it's usually the other family members more so than the child.
Well, and then any time the child raises a complaint about the way he or she is being treated, Well, you know, you abandoned me, you hit me, you ignored me, or whatever, I was molested by my third cousin or something like that.
The family has this great excuse, which is, well, you know, but you have this mental disorder, you have this biochemical problem, so how can we take anything that you say seriously?
I mean, it seems just a great way of really muzzling what, I guess, what people generally call the identified patient, right?
The person who's acting out the family.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Muzzles them.
They can't speak now because they've been diagnosed with something biochemical and therefore their experience It's invalidated, almost by definition.
The whole experience is crushed.
Basically, their whole soul is crushed, and anything that they say is a manifestation of that disorder that they supposedly have.
So, therefore, automatically everything becomes dismissed or looked down upon.
And there is a really fundamental question that It's starting to be asked.
I had Robert Whitaker on the show, author of The Epidemic of Madness, I can't remember what it's called, but he basically was pointing out, he said, well, the psychiatrists say that these SSRIs, these psychotropic drugs, they are like insulin for diabetes.
That's sort of, there's you got this problem, you're taking insulin for the rest of your life and so on.
And this is why it's not a cure.
Insulin doesn't cure that.
It just manages the symptoms.
It's not a cure.
It doesn't get better.
It manages the symptoms.
But when insulin was introduced into the medical model, deaths and problems from diabetes plummeted.
People genuinely were able to productively manage their symptoms and they did not get worse.
And as Robert Whitaker has pointed out repeatedly, since the introduction of these drugs, mental health problems Well, that's correct because there was no...
There was no imbalance to begin with.
If any imbalance arose, it came from the drugs.
That's what we have to look at.
And I find it interesting, too, that we We've seen a rise in violence and so forth, and if we explore and look at some of the folks responsible for these situations, now it's not to say that they may not have had some other issues going on, but it's interesting to look at that all of them were taking some type of psychiatric drug.
So I do believe that's something that we need to really begin to explore, is why is that?
Right.
And you have an example on your blog of, and if you could run through it, I think it would be helpful for people, how a child who is considered to be unruly or disruptive, and there's been lots of theories as to why that may be happening.
You know, increase in single-parent households means a decrease in attention towards children, lack of male role models, of course, in particular for male children, for boys.
And also, of course, there's been a sort of shift in the focus Of education more towards what is generally perceived to be girls' needs and requirements, a little less outdoor activity, a little bit less hands-on, a little bit less active, and that can make boys kind of twitchy behind the desk all day.
But for whatever reason, these diagnoses are going through the roof, and there doesn't seem to be much of a break, much of a sort of pause and consider, much of a deceleration.
In this process.
And that just seems extraordinarily chilling that we are trying to...
It's sort of a Soviet model of psychiatry.
And Soviets would say, well, anybody who's not happy under communism, I mean, they must be insane because communism is perfect.
And therefore they would, you know, stuff them full of horse tranquilizers and stick them in some mental health gulag.
And it seems just a very, again, not to the same extreme, but it's a very similar philosophy.
Well, it can't be anything wrong with society.
It can't be anything wrong with families.
Therefore, any dysfunction, the only possibility that it can be is some imaginary illness.
It's almost like there's a new form of demonic possession.
Right.
And I see this happening time and time again.
I remember talking just the other day with a teacher who was telling me that they had about 25 kids in the class.
And she said that there was nine kids.
Of the 25 that were on some type of medication.
And so that's a very high number.
And probably in the situations as far as I've examined, it's completely unnecessary to do this.
But it's maintenance and control and being able to subdue So, rather than getting to the roots of anything, it's much easier just to go through that process of subduing and just shutting down the entire experience of the individual.
Yeah, I mean, of course, and it's always children who are the least powerful members of society, the most helpless and dependent.
Right, and that's always the saddest part, is that the children themselves I have no ability to say no to these things.
None of the stories of that where children were complaining of side effects and saying that this makes me feel funny or uncomfortable or I'm not able to eat or I'm not able to sleep.
But all of that becomes totally dismissed or the psychiatrist will instead just prescribe an additional drug to try to counteract the things that the child is complaining about.
Right.
Thus further demonstrating more symptoms down the road which require more medication.
Right.
So I've given that example of how it starts out that maybe a kid is in the classroom and being somewhat disrupted, so they put him on a stimulant and so the stimulant begins to have some ticks and so forth and so they prescribe Another drug.
And then from there, maybe they see, okay, well, no, we're beginning to see that there's emerging bipolar, because his mood is off.
So then they give him Depakote as a mood stabilizer.
And then the combination of drugs can, and I've actually seen a lot of folks where this has happened, that They actually begin to develop kind of a psychotic sort of situation.
So then it becomes more drugs, risperbol, whatever.
So to the point where the person becomes completely unable to function.
And when I say this, unfortunately I think this is more common than what you would know.
To see how this situation of Cocktails of drugs are created for children.
Well, because they're not treating anything that is biologically detectable.
You know, they keep coming up with these theories that are as low as serotonin, but it turns out to not.
None of this does.
No brain scan, no blood test.
They're treating like a metaphor.
And so how do you treat a metaphor?
No, there's none of that.
Yeah, you just fire medication at it until, I don't know, something happens.
You know, making huge profits along the way.
And this conflict of interest is something that I don't want to take over the show with a whole rant or anything, but this conflict of interest to me is something, you know, I worked for many years as an entrepreneur and conflict of interest was something we had to take very seriously inside a trading conflict of interest.
It was very, very important to stay on the sunny side of ethics and the law in those issues.
And when you start reading about the conflict of interest between the people defining mental illness and their direct financial relationships, With the pharmaceutical companies that are manufacturing the drugs to treat these imaginary ailments.
It's deeply shocking to anybody with any ethical sense whatsoever.
I think there was nobody on the board of the DSM-IV who didn't have direct financial ties to pharmaceutical companies who are being paid.
Right, and there was an FDA panel There was an FDA panel where the majority, I believe like 90% of those on the panel had some type of ties to pharmaceutical companies.
Now I think the other thing that's important for people to look at too is to pay attention to the advertising that's out there.
They never say in the drug commercials that this drug...
is definitely going to treat this chemical imbalance.
It says that this particular disorder may be caused by a chemical imbalance, and it may do something for that, because they don't know.
They have nothing conclusive to prove that theory.
But people, I don't think, often are tuning in to the language of the advertising.
Yes, and the frustrating thing is that even if a conclusive proof were arrived at tomorrow, double-blind research, independently verified, replicatable around the world, even if some biochemical imbalance were detected tomorrow, there's absolutely no reason to believe that A, it was not caused by environment, and B, it would be treated by these medications.
Gabbard Matteo, as I'm sure you're aware, he's been on this show too, He talks quite extensively in the realm of Hungry Ghosts about the degree to which brain chemistry is affected by a trauma and affection or the lack thereof, connection or the lack thereof.
I'd give you an example in this area as well.
If I go to my physician and the nurse measures my heart rate, And then the physician comes in unexpectedly and startles me and then measures my heart rate again and says, you know, you have heart disease.
We would find that just bizarre.
But that is kind of what is happening in psychiatry, is that a person is going through a traumatic event or some type of experience that is not pleasant, and so I look at it as if there is any change Physiologically or so forth, this is a normal reaction to what they are experiencing.
But instead, they're labeling it, no, this is a disease.
Right.
Yeah, it's completely bizarre.
And I really do believe that in the future they will look upon this as, in a strange way, even more dangerous.
Than, you know, the ice therapies, the coma therapies, the electroshock therapies and so on that were going on in the 30s and 40s and 50s.
They will look at this as more insidious and in many ways more dangerous because it's so plausible and it's so quote non-invasive and non-obvious and also because it's being applied to children who are fundamentally and functionally voiceless within our modern society.
I think that people will look upon this as a truly horrific I think it's going to take a lot of time for that to arise, and that's always the sad thing.
For instance, in the age where lobotomy was being performed quite a lot, it took about 10 years before They realize how terrible a procedure this was.
But at the same time, there you have 10 years of damage.
Now, the other thing that I'll say is that other medical fields, they create new drugs for existing diseases, whereas it seems that psychiatry today creates New diseases for existing drugs.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
That is chilling.
Now, if we can...
I could certainly rant about this until the cows came home, but it may not be specifically enjoyable for everyone.
But I wonder if we could shift a little bit, and I will be a little quieter here because this is a realm I know very little about.
But the autism spectrum disorders that you...
I know you've created a foundation to raise awareness and empathy towards those who experience autistic symptoms.
Can you tell us a little bit about what it is your thoughts about the etiology and the best ways to help people with this spectrum of symptoms to flourish and function within society?
Well, the first thing that I will clarify I don't look at autism as a disease at all.
Instead, I look at it as a mode of being.
So it's an umbrella term that is simply describing how a person relates or does not relate to the world around them.
So there could be a whole number of reasons why a person is autistic.
So you may have a child who has cerebral palsy who is autistic.
You may have other issues What I see is the best approach is one that is based on relationship, where I'm not forcing them to enter my world.
I'm trying to gain acceptance into theirs.
And so when I say this relational approach, I can kind of throw out an example because I think this was something that I thought was very powerful.
I once had a little five-year-old who, he did not speak.
So I prefer now to use the term pre-verbal rather than non-verbal because I see that some of these children are capable of speaking with the right supports.
So anyway, he comes in to my office and he begins banging on the secretary's computer keyboard.
So he's bang, bang, bang.
Now in the center of the room we had this ball pit and he used to really enjoy this.
The secretary was getting kind of annoyed with him.
So I said, I'll just let him go, let him go.
So I told him, I said, if you keep doing that, I'm going to scoop you up and I'm going to throw you into the ball pit.
So that's what I do.
I pick him up and I throw him in.
He giggles and he laughs and so forth.
And he comes back again.
And this time, he doesn't hit the keyboard.
He just puts his hand towards it, smirks, And then falls back into my arms.
And so I take him and I throw him back in again.
That time he gets out and actually tells me to do it again.
And it's the first time that he had ever used any language at all.
So it was just the process of that connection that was made with him.
So I think that's where the focus should be.
The common thing that is utilized is applied behavior analysis.
And that tends to be where particularly with state funding and so forth, that's all they want to fund.
And it's a very rigid process where the child can go on for like 40 hours a week of very just intensive repetitive drills.
To me, I find that rather degrading and dehumanizing at times.
It's not to say that there are not certain skills that can be taught, but I think that having this relational approach is a far better way to be able to transfer those skills to these persons.
Right, right.
Do you have any thoughts about where I guess non-standard behaviors may be coming from?
Give me an example specifically as to which you are referring to.
Maybe some of the OCD aspects of autism or the non-verbal or I guess what is considered to be the hyperstimulation of the senses that is associated with the autism.
Well, like I said, I think that there could be a whole number of things that could be going on.
Sometimes there are actual medical causation that leads to the development of sensory issues and so forth.
I've noticed some children that have a very high pain tolerance and all of that.
Things that we would label as meltdowns are usually often triggered by the sensory input.
So what I've noticed for autistic kids is that I think that they tend to be far more sensitive to the environment around them.
So they're absorbing all of this up and then it just leads them to overwhelm.
And so the behaviors that are difficult usually are coming out because of that overwhelm that they're experiencing.
Right.
And so is there also, I've heard sort of various stories about The degree to which people with autistic type symptoms or children with autistic type symptoms might be masking some extraordinary intellectual abilities or people...
I mean, some people say, well, they generally have below average cognitive abilities and other people say, well, there is the opportunity or possibility of very high cognitive abilities.
And I know you've written to say that it's not cognitively based.
It shouldn't be cognitively biased when we're looking at these people.
No.
And I always...
I have always presumed intellect whenever I have dealt with any autistic individual.
And even if they are not able to speak, we have to look at the behavior as a form of communication.
So sometimes the way they are behaving is telling us something that either they are in distress or they have a need or whatever.
It does not mean that they are necessarily lacking in intellect at all.
And what I do find is usually you do have where you have a social type of ethicist, but there is usually one thing that Or talent that they have that they are very gifted in.
And I have found that many times over.
And oftentimes there are things that they may have as special interests that do become kind of an obsessive sort of thing.
And sometimes some unusual aspects of those special interests.
I had one...
A fellow that I worked with that is a teenager, and fortunately, through the whole process, he ended up actually getting a master's degree in video production.
But the process that we did, because initially, when he was a teenager, he had some quirky little habits, and one of them was to collect lamb chop puppets.
So he had like 50 or so of these Lamb Chop Puppets all scattered in his room.
And he would make these videos.
And that was an interesting part of the work with him too, is that his family and others were really not understanding what these videos were about.
They just thought, okay, it's just random stuff with Lamb Chop Puppets and that's kind of strange.
So I began to explore that with him, and I found out that as different things happen in his life, sometimes good, sometimes bad, he would act these scenarios out through the videos and through the puppets.
So it was his way of coping.
Now, he later began to do other types of videos, and that was his obsession.
He was fascinated by videos.
I began to think about that.
I'm thinking, okay, how can we channel this into something that's actually going to work for him?
So he did very well academically.
So once he graduated high school, I suggested to him and I said, I will help you out to get into a college program.
And I said, why don't you consider doing something in this video realm?
Well, that's exactly what he did.
And he's very gifted in that.
So That's been part of my focus in my work, too, is to focus on strengths to help these folks be able to find their niche.
Because I think that's part of the problem, too, is that you have these programs that automatically look at autistic people as that they are defective, and we need to alter them and change them, even if that's by force or coercion.
We have to make them into this so-called normal person, whatever that may be.
Right.
As opposed to being curious and exploring the individual possibilities, there always seems to be an arrogance on the part of a lot of mental health professionals in that society is normal, we're normal, and deviations, we shouldn't be curious about them.
them, we shouldn't look and see if there's something to be offered to society that these people can see.
It's just like, well, we just, we got to, we got to get them in the box.
We got to, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And I find that to be a very sad thing that many of these individuals are looked down upon.
I've even seen folks that have even said that they were not fully human.
That's actually been said to me.
But I find that with a respectful, compassionate way of interaction that these folks can do brilliant things.
And I think that we need to be embracing the diversity and understanding them better rather than having these attitudes that they have to be altered.
Yes.
Or that they are broken or defective.
Yeah, I certainly think that would be the case.
I mean, all paradigms are overthrown in society.
You know, the free market of ideas is constantly casting down old idols and bringing up new ones.
And the idea that we've finished that and somehow achieved perfection, to me, is a kind of insanity that I think is only going to continue to harm those who don't fit into the existing delusions, but hopefully are getting a little closer to the truth themselves.
All paradigms People who advance society are considered insane at one point or another and probably seem that way to most people.
And I hope that this helps people to understand that there are different ways of thinking and different ways of being that we can learn a lot from and shouldn't necessarily just instantly pathologize with the arrogance of we're okay and any deviations are problematic.
Right.
Now, you have a great blog.
I know it's on Psychology Today.
If you could just remind people of how to get your writings and also any other ways that you would like for my listeners and watchers at least to be able to get in touch with you or read what it is that you're producing.
Okay, well, the blog on Psychology Today is titled Extreme States of Mind.
So if you search for that at Psychology Today, you can find that.
And then I'm also listed on selfgrowth.com, which has some prior interviews, articles, etc.
So folks can just search for my name under that site and the information will come up.
And very consistently enjoyable stuff comes out of you from Facebook as well.
It's always something to think about, stuff that makes you go, hmm, in a very good way.
So if you wanted to check out Dr.
Edmonds on Facebook as well, we'll link to that as well.
Of course, I hugely appreciate your time tonight.
Thank you so much.
And, of course, thank you so much for translating some of this arcane stuff into material which is accessible to, you know, idiot lay people like myself.
It's hugely appreciated.
So thank you so much, Dr.
Edmonds.
Really, really appreciate your time.
Yes, thank you.
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