Have you ever wondered if your medication is causing some of your problems? Do they make you feel worse? If so, you'd probably benefit from reading psychiatrist Peter Breggin's book, "Why your Drug May be Your Problem: how and why to stop taking psychiatric medicine." So many of us are diagnosed with bipolar because of a crisis situation that usually involves our family, friends, or the police, and we're told by a psychiatrist that we were born with a hereditary, lifelong illness that involves imbalances in our brain chemistry. The problem with this approach is that many of us can't relate to this diagnosis because leading up to our crisis we may never had been involved in the mental health system. Interestingly enough, it's been shown in studies that people can have a temporary mental health crisis that can be a transforming experience if we integrate what we learned from the experience. A lot of people are diagnosed with bipolar or schizophrenia too early in their experience because our current mental health system pathologizes all mental disturbances. In fact, transpersonal psychologists have discovered a worldwide epidemic of what's known as the "spiritual emergency", a condition that resembles bipolar or schizophrenia, but is not actually a mental illness. What we need is the psychiatrist who is less eager to prescribe dangerous, toxic medications for people who are having a temporary extreme state of mind. I believe that if psychiatrist will allow people to experience their crisis fully without interferening with drugs or involuntary hospitalization, we'll find that a lot of people recover naturally and do not, in fact, need medication their entire life. Of course, the chronic patient who has been hospitalized many times throughout their life may indeed depend on this medication permanently, but how do we know that the medication itself isn't causing the disturbance?
