tcj_phx

I've posted somewhat extensively about my friend's psychiatric misdiagnosis.

Tl/dr: My assessment of her predicament is that her genetic condition (MTHFR) -> Vitamin B9 (folate) deficiency -> depression -> substance abuse -> psychosis.

The medical professionals' diagnose "psychosis unspecified", and pronounce that she requires treatment with anti-psychotics in perpetuity. (Does this really pass as 'modern medicine'?)

Robert Whitaker's foundation published my essay about what I've observed of involuntary mental health: Malignant Do-Gooderism: The Tragedies of Allopathic Psychiatry - https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/malignant-gooderism/

This was before the Supreme Court of the United States denied my petition. I asked them to reconsider, and tweeted about the petition for rehearing: https://twitter.com/JamesKnochel/status/1509632664302600213

Justices denied that too. My next petition is due May 19.

From this article:

> “What impresses me most,” he said, “is how recalcitrant mental illness is, how difficult it is to comprehend, how hard it is to come up with effective treatments and ultimately, how it is best to be honest about what we don’t know, so we can pursue a more eclectic approach to treating it and not be certain we know the right answer.”

IMHO, mental illness is much simpler than the professionals think, they're just stuck in a briar patch of palliative treatments that don't work. My readings at the Science Library are that "Mental Illness" has been known to fundamentally be a metabolic problem that is usually triggered by 'emotional stress', and often exacerbated by malnourishment. (Oh yeah, there's a reply to one of my earlier comments about 'histamine'... [edit] the reply to my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27993001 )

One of my latest anecdotes is my friend coming to visit me, and how I decided I had no choice but to call the Sheriff on her (she was whacked out on 'something'). The Sheriff picked her up on an outstanding warrant. She came back a week later for her backpack, at 75% of her normal capacity. We spent a few hours doing normal things. She picked up an electrolyte concentrate at the grocery store. I protested that it had fake sugar, but she got it anyways. Went home, she had her electrolyte drink, started eating, then she fell apart. "I have to leave." hmm? While going down the driveway, she said "Don't follow me, I don't know you."

It was like flipping a switch: functional -> dysfunctional. 'What the hell just happened?' Then I remembered the electrolyte drink: !!!!!.

Brains require glucose. If you're not on the edge of sanity you can tolerate a little artificial sweetener. But fake sugar is terrible stuff.

Brains also need B-vitamins and progesterone USP (birth control w/ fake progesterone, often causes depression) and a whole bunch of other stuff. "Stress" depletes people's resources. Simple, simple, simple.

If any of you know an attorney on the SCOTUS bar who'd like to serve up some humble pie to the justices, I'd appreciate a referral. My last petition said they should reconsider because their baby's ugly, and they still ignored me.

(140)

That was my comment about methylation? It's currently at +1, maybe you upvoted to balance out a down-vote? ;)

How old is your daughter? Is she on birth control, either for being a fertile woman who doesn't want to be pregnant (i.e., to sabotage her fertility) or to treat dysmenorrhea?

My friend's health was sabotaged with depot provera, the time-release endocrine disruptor. Progesterone is a very important brain hormone. Progesterone USP is a synthetic version of what the body makes for itself.

Sometimes all a person needs to improve their metabolism is real b-vitamins from whole wheat sourdough bread (slow yeast -> natural b-vitamins, instead of synthetic b-vitamins).

You can contact me through Twitter - I have more ideas about solving depression. My username is at the bottom of my Mad In America essay (link in my other comment).

[edit]

There's a replication crisis in science, in that most published literature can't be replicated. In medicine every patient is unique. It's hard to be scientific when no experiment with humans is repeatable.

With regards to the 'current front page question about anti-depressants': at least the mental health industry aspires to be helpful. Depression is mostly solved, except for how big business can make $$$ from simple fixes for depression.

My friend is a poor methylator [0], which means she can't turn the provitamin food fortification folic acid into Vitamin B-9. The prescription drug Deplin is a form of Vitamin B-9 that is approved as an add-on therapy, for when 'antidepressants don't work'. AFAIK, people who are poor methylators say they do better when they avoid folic acid.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30334122

I have commented before about my efforts to help my friend get appropriate treatment. My latest filing, a petition for rehearing, has been distributed to the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States [1]. Hopefully they'll talk about it at their conference on April 14 2022.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30884187

Sometimes people benefit from the SSRIs' allepregnanolone boost [2].

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30550919

My personal efforts to extract my friend from her psychiatric misdiagnosis are ongoing [ref: my comment history]. I think I'm going to get somewhere.

The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] denied my petition for extraordinary writ [0] on February 22. This asked SCOTUS to order the district court to abide by the case law requiring an evidentiary hearing (tl/dr: I filed for habeas corpus in the US District Court in January 2018. My friend's legal mail was intercepted by her $9,000/month treatment center. The owner of the facility was formerly a criminal defense attorney, and wrote a crafty letter which was docketed as a 'motion to dismiss'. I now have videos proving this is fraudulent. The District Court and the Court of Appeals would rather not deal with me, because I'm asking them to deal with our make-work mental health industry.)

I sent SCOTUS a petition for rehearing [1] last month. This time I told them about how the Soviets' preferred medication for dissident re-education was haloperidol, My petition for rehearing specifically asks the supreme court to end the medical torture of U.S. citizens [pdf pg 3]. This has been distributed for the April 14 2022 conference.

My friend is 'stabilized' with haloperidol when she gets out of sorts [1, pg 4]. All she actually needs is an adequate diet and a low-stress environment.

The Mad in America [MIA] foundation posted my essay about how I got to file at SCOTUS: Malignant Do-Gooderism: The Tragedies of Allopathic Psychiatry - https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/malignant-gooderism/

If SCOTUS denies my petition for rehearing, I next get to file a proper petition for writ of certiorari. My application for extension of time [2] was granted last month. (Something interesting: 21A512 has a 'received' stamp, whereas [1] does not. The difference is that I had the post office stamp the date on the outside of the envelope on [1], whereas I just sent 21A512 with stamps, and it presumably was not dated. SCOTUS pro-tip: have your mailings date-stamped by the post office.)

A few people have reached out to me on Twitter after reading my MIA essay. One of them has a very good 'false claims act' suit. She escaped from Arizona's involuntary mental health industry after 3 years of harmful treatment, with the assistance of her family. Can't share the details, because 'false claims' cannot be presented for swindles that are covered in the media (for example). I remember also witnessing the class of medical abuse that this woman was subjected to.

[0] SCOTUS Docket: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...

[1] Petition for Rehearing: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-6444/219300/202...

[2] Extension of Time: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...

This problem is solved, just not in pill form.

There's an old solution that allows men to reduce their sperm count, down to an effective-zero: raise the temperature of the testicles to be body temperature.

In ancient times bread bakers were known to not father as many children, until they stopped working the ovens. The heat shock protein disrupts sperm production for longer periods of time. HSP forms at 104 degrees, iirc.

One of my previous comments about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28023798

Appologies, didn't mean to come across as dismissive. There are many types of depression. The type of depression that MAOIs worked best for were 'funks' - to help the person get an energy boost to get them out of bed. It is simplistic to try to treat depression as a chronic condition with palliative drugs.

I'm dismissive of Allopathic Psychiatry because those doctors hurt my friend, and force her to take prescriptions to make her substance abuse problems worse. Really all she needs is sobriety, adequate nutrition, and a few basic medical interventions. But she's much more profitable as a ward who will never get better.

https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/malignant-gooderism/

Someone reached out to me about this piece... Said she got the postpartum depression -> postpartum psychosis, and considers the actual effects of some of the drugs she was forced to take 'torture'.

Benzo's hurt a lot of people, without actually fixing anyone's problems. The only use for a benzo is as a single-dose regimen, e.g. to help get a claustrophobic person into an MRI machine. Gamma-Hydroxybutyric Acid (GHB) is a great pro-GABA drug that crosses the blood brain barrier. It's now highly controlled because it can also be used nefariously (date rape drug). Why fix people's problems when you can create them?

> as is lithium

My friend called me up and said she'd bought herself some lithium. I strongly cautioned against it. 8 or 12 hours later she was despondent. I pointed out how she'd poisoned herself that morning and told her to throw the rest away.

She did the same with... 5HTP? Something to increase serotonin 'naturally'. She tried it multiple times, it wrecked her each time. I told her to throw that stuff away too, I think she finally did.

Depression is fundamentally a metabolic problem: sometimes nutritional, sometimes thyroid function, sometimes amplified by emotional stress, sometimes energetic ('people who are depressed are always [energetically] homolateral'). People get seasonal depression when the sun goes away for the winter. Supplemental red light can't be put in a pill (red light refreshes cytochrome c oxidase [mitochondria]). Etc.

ECT tries to reset people's brains, without doing anything else. It's a simplistic treatment that needs to be treated like calomel/quicksilver (mercury).

Palliative drugs never fix the problem. Sometimes they can be useful (Reversible MAOI's, such as Methylene Blue) while you figure out what's going on.

Robert Whitaker's introduction to his present work was when he was an investigative reporter at the Boston Globe. He noticed something about how the clinical trials for Prozac showed this drug made some people suicidal. Prozac got approved anyways.

Sometimes SSRI's help depression because they increase allopregnanolone in the brain [0], not because of effects on serotonin.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859433

The first-generation anti-depressants, the MAOI's, were reasonably effective at getting people out of a funk. But they didn't combine well with fine cheese [1], so when the patents expired the industry moved on to less effective drugs.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This MIA blog post says the evidence base for ECT is not very strong:

> No studies have found any evidence that ECT is better than placebo beyond the end of treatment. Nevertheless, all five meta-analyses relying on these studies have concluded that ECT is more effective than placebo, despite the studies’ multiple failings. Meanwhile evidence of persistent or permanent memory loss in 12% to 55% of patients has accumulated.

- https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/fear-loathing-ect-debat...

Robert Whitaker chronicles the deteriotation of mental health treatment in Mad In America. The Quakers had asylums for people who had 'episodes'. The clients were fed 4 meals a day and kept safe. 80-90% recovered to the point where they could leave the asylum.

Non-quaker asylums were much less effective. Then the doctors started doctoring on psychotic patients... Labotomies, ECT (brain electrocution). These treatments didn't work at all. The use of ineffective treatment made Psychiatry an easy capture by the drug industry.

See my other comment in this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549579

The tragedy of Allopathic Psychiatry is that the doctors think they know what they're doing.

In March 2015, I thought my new friend had substance abuse problems: methadone, heroin, cocaine, alcohol. She invited me into her world. There were a few times when I watched her make herself psychotic when she used too much cocaine, but she came out of that state when the cocaine wore off and got some food. (Ref: my comment history.)

The mental health industry captured her when she ran out of alcohol (see Mad In America link below)

When you're ordered to submit to Allopathic Psychiatry, you can't complain about the forced medications' side effects.

> Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference that he has no intention of rounding people up and locking them away. Instead, he said his plan would offer a way for people to get court-ordered psychiatric treatment, medication and housing, preferably before they are arrested.

My friend was arrested after the start of her court-ordered psychiatric treatment. She'd gotten a job, but couldn't handle the stress, self-medicated with alcohol, relapsed on meth amphetamine. Her doctors use their orders for involuntary treatment to force her to submit to medications that are specifically contraindicated for substance abuse. The probation court made her predicament even worse.

I went to a few of my friend's probation court sessions. I remember a guy who complained about his forced treatment with Abilify (antipsychotic). The judge didn't care. The next time I saw him, he was like "Abilify is the greatest drug ever!". He graduated from probation court, don't know what happened to him. Probably back in the system: Abilify causes compulsive behaviors.

After my friend had been forcibly treated for about 2+ years, all the new clients at her "dual diagnosis" drug treatment program were getting cheek swabbed. She asked for this genetic test for herself, and learned that she can't turn the provitamin folic acid (shelf stable, used to fortify food) into methylated forms of folate (Vitamin B-9, used for DNA synthesis). Her doctors don't care, and continue to force her to take anti-psychotics because that's the only way they know to treat transient psychosis.

The Mad in America Foundation posted my writeup about my efforts on my friend's behalf: Malignant Do-gooderism: The Tragedies of Allopathic Psychiatry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30388925

Someone who read the link above reached out to me over Twitter. This woman had experienced postpartum depression -> postpartum psychosis -> orders for involuntary mental health treatment. She was also in Arizona - I recognized many of the facilities she'd named.

She described what they did to her as 'torture'. She was able to escape with the help of her sister, who negotiated with the psychiatrists on her behalf, until she was able to negotiate for herself.

SCOTUS denied my petition. I intend to seek congressional oversite. I'm going to film a video to explain my earlier videos, which prove my friend was fine before she ran out of alcohol, and proving fraud on the United States Court.

Psychiatry would be exponentially more effective if they'd stop treating their patients allopathically.

Edit: Submitted a WSJ article recently, had to change the title to something less click-baity: 'Report about a case of hydrocephalus mistaken for 'mental illness'" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30354625

I created this throwaway to tell about the time I tried to use the US Constitution’s most fundamental protection of liberty to free my friend from unlawful confinement in an emergency room. I made two little mistakes, and was not successful at preventing my friend from being misdiagnosed by the mental health industry.

This is a write-up about my petition [0] pending in the Supreme Court of the United States. The Justices are hopefully talking about my petition today. The blog post is meant to provide context for why I’ve gone all the way to the top of our judicial system for redress of my grievances regarding my friend’s being forcibly subjected to psychiatric pseudo-medicine, and my having been given the animal farm treatment by the country’s courts.

Tweet-thread: https://twitter.com/JamesKnochel/status/1494727765093797888

[0] SCOTUS petition: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...

tl/dr: I was convicted of trying to use a granted court order to free my friend from unlawful confinement. My videos from before her first 2015 hospitalization prove she was actually fine before she ran out of alcohol and became psychotic. In late 2017 I found a probate attorney who was oddly-familiar with my subsequent state court petitions and appeals: he confirmed it was fully within my rights to file these petitions, but I was ‘dealing with a rural judge who will never rule against the community’s non-profit mental health service provider.’ In January 2018 my friend’s court-ordered treatment center perpetrated fraud on the United States Court (subject of my current SCOTUS Petition).

If the system can do this to us, they can do it to anyone. I’ve heard of many others, addicts just like my friend, who are trapped in the mental health system, but have no one to advocate for them. The mental health system and the criminal justice system are not supposed to make work for each other, but this is what they do.

I learned about Robert Whitaker’s books and foundation through a link one of you provided to reddit (iirc). These were profoundly helpful for helping me understand why the mental health industry has standardized on interventions that do not work. I sent Mr. Whitaker a letter, he emailed me back, and has been responsive to my sporadic questions over the years. The ‘truth bomb’ I referenced in my piece for MadInAmerica.com refers to Whitaker’s answer to my question about the Soviets’ use of mental hospitals: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2800147/

I’m optimistic that at least one of the three clerks who read my Petition after it was distributed kicked it up to their justice[s], so that they will talk about my grievances at their conference today.

----

I had only posted anonymously about this because “missionaries get eaten by cannibals” [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566449 (I was so optimistic. Job stress → drinking, then she went home to visit her mother, visited ‘friends’, used drugs, fell apart) / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12284369 (this must’ve been right before I got animal farmed by the rural court)

Anonymity is no longer an option. tcj_phx stands for ‘Teslabox Courts Justice in Phoenix’.

Before yesterday, no one on the internet cared about my Petition docketed at SCOTUS (no links -> not found on the search engines; SCOTUS’ website is not SEO-optimized). Now a handful more people have read about my struggle.

If one of the three clerks who reads my petition believes it’s genuine, I think the justices will intervene. If SCOTUS grants my petition, it’s a ‘landmark case’ that ought to transform the mental health industry.

Q: How do I extend an olive branch to Medicine?

I’m not trying to go all Inigo Montoya [2] on conventional medicine. But there’s still the risk that conventional medical professionals might misinterpret my petition as an ‘attack on science’. People like me are usually dismissed as cranks, anti-science, anti-psychiatry, anti-vaxxers, etc, when really we’re just observing iatrogenesis (illness caused by treatments).

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv2pvIrBseI

Medicine has made great progress abandoning harmful treatments over the last 200 years, but is still sometimes needlessly ineffective. One cause of this is hubris. The pharmaceutical industry also seems to have a stranglehold on medical education (ref: Whitaker’s book Psychiatry Under the Influence, etc).

This is tragic because Medicine is incredibly close to figuring out actual best practices for human health.

Q: Besides allopathic psychiatry, what else in modern medicine is obsolete?

Q: How do I help Medicine realize they can do better by implementing what’s already been discovered?

The original title of this link is “She was headed to a locked psych ward. Then an ER doctor made a startling discovery”, which doesn’t describe the article very well. My substitute title attempts to capture the essence of the piece.

I noticed this link on https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/02/headed-locked-psych-war...

The important part of the article:

  But something indefinable — [emergency physician Elizabeth] 
  Mitchell characterized it as “maybe gut instinct” honed by nearly 
  two decades of practice — prompted her to order a CT scan of 
  Chloe’s head to better assess her mental status. […]

  Chloe had a life-threatening condition that Mitchell characterized 
  as “the most severe case of hydrocephalus I’ve ever seen.” She 
  needed brain surgery as soon as it could be scheduled and was 
  being sent to the neuro-ICU at Cedars-Sinai.  

  Hydrocephalus, popularly known as “water on the brain,” is 
  caused by the accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid in cavities 
  known as ventricles. Spinal fluid, which cushions the brain, is 
  critically important to a wide variety of brain functions. Excess 
  fluid was compressing the brain’s frontal lobes — responsible 
  for memory, decision-making and emotion — against the inside 
  of Chloe’s skull because it could not be reabsorbed. Without 
  treatment, hydrocephalus, which can be present at birth or occur 
  later in life, can cause brain damage, coma or death.

  Alison had never heard of hydrocephalus. And Chloe, she told 
  Mitchell, had never undergone brain imaging.

  Mitchell mentioned the diagnostic mnemonic she had learned in 
  medical school; “wet, wobbly and wacky.” She was incredulous 
  as Alison ticked off telltale symptoms of hydrocephalus, many of 
  which dated back years: poor balance, gait problems, personality 
  changes, confusion, fainting, memory lapses and involuntary 
  urination.

  “I cannot believe that no one ever ordered a CT scan,” Mitchell 
  said. “That’s what I thought was very weird.”

I’m posting something on Mad In America on Thursday where I say that there are always causes behind supposed cases of “mental illness”, and psychiatrists should work harder to figure out what’s going on in their patients.

Chloe’s case of hydrocephalus probably started when she was a child. It wasn’t caught, not even when overt symptoms started to develop. If she’d been sent to the psych hospital, she never would have recovered.

Good essay, though it's a little tilted towards the 'medical model' of mental health treatment. I appreciate the 'insight from epidemiology': "Health care itself explains only a small fraction of health outcomes. Much of what we need for better outcomes is fundamental, but it is not part of health care. Social factors [...] are much more important for health outcomes than your specific diagnosis or health-care plan."

I've commented somewhat extensively about my friend's struggle with the mental health industry. They've decided she's a chronic psychotic who requires anti-psychotics for the rest of her life.

A year after she was formally misdiagnosed by the mental health industry I found videos on my phone from ~2 weeks before that 2015 hospitalization. I think my videos prove that my friend's supposedly-chronic condition can be entirely explained by substance abuse.

The tragedy of "American Mental Health Care" is the use of palliative drugs, when the various causes of the various diagnoses have actually been figured out by researchers. Science knows exactly how stimulants harm the metabolism [0]. The symptoms of mental illness can usually be explained as a metabolic problem - sometimes caused by substance abuse, sometimes by diet, always exacerbated by 'stress'.

Emotional stress is the most important drain on the body's metabolism. I have a bunch of references from books about stress - went to the ASU science library to read a book referenced in Gabor Maté's In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts [1], and found a discussion of how 'stress' contributes to psychosis.

[0] My comment/quote/submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18211048 - "I learned from a Hacker News comment/submission a while ago that cocaine causes its harm by shredding the mitochondria. [searching] Ahh, found it, this one:" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956058

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/In_the_Realm_of_Hungry_...

In 2018, after her treatment center perpetrated fraud on the District Court, my friend got annoyed about how all the new clients at her treatment center were getting cheek-swabbed. She herself had not been cheek-swabbed when she was sent there 2 years before, and asked to have this genetic test. It revealed that she is a poor methylator, who cannot turn the provitamin folic acid (commonly used to fortify food as it is shelf-stable) into Vitamin B-9. She said that adding L-Methy-Folate to her routine was like flipping a switch from "depressed" to "not-depressed" [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27990331 (also some good responses to my comment - search for 'histamine')

The Supreme Court of the United States is going to be considering my petition soon. I'm optimistic that it will be one of the handful that they grant. All I'm asking is for them to order the district court to hold the evidentiary hearing that is required by the case law. (I'm currently working on a write-up of my experience for https://MadInAmerica.com, using some tips from HN moderator dang.)

One of these cream whippers came into my hands recently. It came with a box of 10 chargers, where 1 was missing. I speculate the owner used their new cream whipper once and decided it was too much work to clean. After ~20 years they gave it to the non-profit's yard sale, where I found it.

One charger cartridge is good for maybe a pint of whipped cream. You'd need 4+ chargers for a gallon of whipped cream. A restaurant could easily go through 50 chargers a week.

https://www.amazon.com/iSi-Professional-Whipped-Cream-Charge...

Another submission on this news item is getting a little more traction. I posted there about how tobacco does have some medicinal properties: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29499292

Tobacco does have medicinal properties. For example, many psychiatric patients smoke a lot [0]. I propose they use nicotine to counter-act some of the terrible drugs they're forced to take.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/11/schizophrenia-no-smoki...

Nicotene is a partial substitute for Niacin (Vitamin B-3). Niacinamide sometimes helps people reduce their tobacco intake.

The first generation anti-depressants were the Mono Amine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOIs). Tobacco has MAOI-like effects too.

I think tobacco is also an anti-estrogen... Aromatase inhibitor: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2904480/

Compulsions have to be considered in context: people get benefits from tobacco that they do actually need. My friend (a misdiagnosed 'psych patient') took up smoking when she was 12, probably because she was depressed.

Edit: submission of a CS montior link about this same news item: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29500610

Blackstone published his Ratio in 1760's England:

  It is better that ten guilty persons escape 
  than that one innocent suffer.

According to wikipedia, the sentiment expressed is much older than Blackstone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

> This is a particularly prescient idea today. We tell people to trust the legal system to protect their rights.

I was prosecuted for 'trespassing' and 'misdemeanor assault', after my failed attempt to use a granted court order to free my friend from illegal confinement in a hospital emergency room (ref: my comment history).

I think the prosecutor realized while I was testifying that I was not like the other people he prosecuted, and attempted to elicit truth with his cross examination.

I was convicted by the city court judge, and sentenced to 2 years of unsupervised probation. My attorney said the problem was my accuser was a retired police officer who works for the state's largest non-Walmart private employer.

Still furious at getting steamrolled. Aside from the first judge, who granted habeas corpus on my pro se petition, I've gotten screwed by most the other judges who've considered my subsequent petitions over the years.

I think the Justices in Washington DC will have to do their job on my next petition to their court. Previously I asked to file under seal, which gave the court of appeals and the justices a convenient way to avoid having to deal with my petitions.

edit: typos

I have the paperwork from my friend's 2015 mental hospitalization. The doctors both said, essentially, "patient expects us to believe that she was psychotic because she'd been drinking 2 bottles of liquor a day, and using cocaine. We know she's a chronic mental patient who needs these drugs because we got her stabilized in 2008 and 2010..."

Antipsychotics do not treat alcoholism or broken metabolisms (cocaine, genetics, etc). There are always better options.

There are always causes behind the symptom of "psychosis". People commonly develop metabolic problems.

My "crazy" friend was doing okay, back in July [ref: my comment history]. I watched her open a bottle of sugar free electrolyte drink concentrate and drink a serving. Over the course of the next hour she got paranoid and flipped on me, "DON'T FOLLOW ME, I DON'T KNOW YOU", and disappeared.

Brains need glucose and fructose, b-vitamins, thyroid hormone, vitamin A, etc. Stressed brains use more glucose than brains at rest. Old people commonly lose their metabolisms.

I think what I observed was the fake-sugar in the sugar-free drink causing insulin release -> low blood sugar. The normal response to low blood sugar is cortisol release, but people who have a tendency to psychotic disorders can't make cortisol. It was fascinating to watch & reconstruct.

p.s. your sci-hub link is titled "Characteristics of U.S. adults taking prescription antipsychotic medications, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2013–2018"

> Is the 14th Amendment really written in such a way that you can justify just about anything with it?

The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution are known as the Reconstruction amendments. They were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to fix the fundamental problems in the 1792 constitution.

Reconstruction Amendments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments

The Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10) had been held to only constrain the powers of the federal government.

The 11th Amendment had to do with citizens of one state suing another state. The 12th Amendment had to do with the details of electing a president and vice president, and dealt with the problem of the elected president and vice president being opponents of each other (imagine Hillary Clinton being Trump's vice president, and Trump being Biden's vice President).

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. But it wasn't enough to say 'no slavery', as the freed slaves found they were still second-class citizens.

The 14th amendment said that citizens of the states are also citizens of the United States, and thereby they have all the rights accorded in the Bill of Rights, and required "equal protection of the laws". Section 1 is the origin of this branch of rights:

> Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Institute for Justice has some great podcasts about this period of history: https://ij.org/center-for-judicial-engagement/sc/14th-at-150...

Ep 1 - Before the Fourteenth: John Rock and the Birth of Birthright Citizenship - https://soundcloud.com/bound-by-oath/before-the-fourteenth

My efforts in the federal courts on behalf of my friend wouldn't be possible without the 14th amendment. (Summary: After the state supreme court shot me down, I found an attorney who was oddly familiar with my state court habeas corpus petitions and appeals. I said, "I don't even know that I can petition for habeas corpus on behalf of my friend." The attorney replied, "It's fully within your rights to petition for habeas on behalf of your friend, and the statutes are clear that you can. But you're dealing with a rural judge who will never rule against the community's non-profit mental health service provider." Me: 'Oh.' [I got screwed by the state judiciary.] Then the attorney said he couldn't help me, on account of his having already consulted for the person I was suing.)

Federal judges are supposed to be more insulated from local politics because they have lifetime appointments, and are thereby trusted to make politically-inconvenient decisions. In theory. In practice I think they have too much drudgery ("hard menial or dull work.") putting drug mules in federal prison to deal with fundamental mistakes in our treatment of the mentally ill. My district court judge passed the buck up to the court of appeals, who didn't want to deal with me either. I'm going to get a favorable ruling on my current appeal, I hope...

[edit: clarity]

Thanks for the questions. Sorry for the long answer. :)

I like to experiment. I'm currently the only subject who's willing to sign up for my experiments.

I was married once. She was a little off her rocker, I didn't want her getting knocked up, she didn't want to get knocked up, she'd had bad experience with "hormonal birth control" pills, so we only used rubbers. Meh. Neither of us wanted a kid, so it was okay.

Rubbers are like masks: no one likes them.

In those old comments (circa 2016), I discussed how I think women are all given the short stick [1] by the medical system. Women have all the costs of pregnancies, it's fairly easy to render men temporarily infertile, but this is not done because women are easy targets for profiteers.

> And are you not worried about messing up?

I have a microscope. The sperm come back. I'm going for a current sperm test this week. It'll have been 13 weeks (~3 months) since my last heat treatment. I don't know that my sperm count will be normal, but I expect it to be in the low-millions. I expect it'd be back to 'good enough' by six months.

I'm going to switch to the silicone ring because I recently learned that inducing the heat shock proteins is stress-inducing, and I think the French researchers I linked to are more studied in this field than I am. I have a system to facilitate the 112° heat treatments, but I need more parts to finish the next revision, and I want to experiment with the silicone ring. Maybe I'll do a hybrid approach - 5 days of baths w/ the ring... Hmm.

OH - PRO TIP: IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO THE HOT BATH TREATMENTS, HAVE 'GATORADE' WITH SUGAR AND ELECTORLYTES AVAILABLE WHILE TAKING HOT BATHS. (I use salted fruit juice when I'm doing the heat treatments, if I skip this I get light headed. Very dangerous.)

> why are you doing this?

From my earlier comments:

"There is a problem with birth control that the media doesn't like to talk about. While millions of women take birth control, almost all of them eventually (or immediately) hate the side effects. So most women take these awful drugs only because they are seen as the best way to prevent pregnancy." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11934396

"There is quite a gap between modern "medical science" and physiology. The core problem is that it is much more profitable for Wall Street to suppress women's difficult menstrual cycles with drugs, than to implement what was figured out long ago." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11763145 (emphasis added)

[1] "To get the short end of the stick or to get the wrong end of the stick means to get the bad end of a deal, to come out on the bottom of a contest or exchange, to be gotten the better of in any given situation. The connotation is that one has not been treated quite fairly or that one is unlucky." - https://grammarist.com/idiom/get-the-short-end-or-the-wrong-...

Low sperm counts are a big problem for sub-fertile couples, because it really does take 'millions' to get one to fertilize an egg.

It's been about 5.5 years since I started sabotaging my fertility, using 'the old heat methods' [1]. The P.A. who ordered my first sperm test was skeptical about my ambitions, "it only takes one..." But it really does take millions of sperm per ejaculation, so that ~hundreds can get to the egg and work away at the Zona pellucida [0], which is the shell ("glycoprotein layer") that surrounds the egg. (I don't know exactly how many are required, but it's certainly >1. [2])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zona_pellucida / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrosome_reaction

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12869969 / https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1501200000&dateRange=custom&...

[2] "Only about 1 in 1 million sperm that are ejaculated into the vagina will reach the site of fertilization." - https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/cells/embryology/...

I have a microscope (need to get a camera attachment), and I've gotten a few lab tests: my swimmers go away, they come back. How aggressive I was with the heat treatments determined how long they'd stay away. I don't have consistent laboratory numbers, just the sense that it takes 3 weeks of consistent water treatments at 112+° before they're mostly gone. I've done some searches about spermatogenesis cycle, but haven't come up with the reason why it's 3 weeks of treatment before the heat shock proteins eliminate the tails from the sperm. I've gotten lazy and done sporadic treatments at 112+° for a week and a half (iirc)... nothing for a week. By 3 weeks the sperm are gone. If I'm lazy, and don't do the full 3-week protocol (at least 5 days/week for 3 weeks), they'll come back sooner. [<- edited to clarify. 16-18 days over 3 weeks should be enough to have 2 months of 0 sperm. 5 days of treatment for 1 week might get you to 0 motile sperm 3 weeks after the first treatment, then you'd be at 0 motile sperm for a month or so. It's been 5 years of inconsistent effort and ad hoc experimentation...]

The whole spermatogenesis cycle takes between 74 and 120 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatogenesis#Duration

My girlfriend was not likely to pop an egg out (on account of details covered previously) and we weren't able to get together as often as I'd've liked. So don't rely on my anecdotes: n=1, etc.

I emailed with a HN user from France, who'd linked to a French website about male fertility [3]. This year I noticed that site had a link a new site which sells a silicone ring for helping men sabotage their fertility: https://www.thoreme.com/

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20201203165532/http://www.contra...

The French dudes are simply elevating their testicles to keep them at body temperature, thereby dramatically lowering their sperm counts. Based on my own experiments, I think a man would have to wear this silicone ring 24/7 to keep their count low enough to prevent conception. If you took it off at night, I'd wager your sperm count might only go down by 1/2 to 2/3. Which might be enough.

With that said, my tax refund just arrived. I think I'll buy one...

If I had a problem with low sperm count, I'd avoid phyto-estrogens and xeno-estrogens are the first things to avoid at all costs: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12477510/

Lots of options for improving male fertility come to mind, but avoiding plasticizers and PCB's is probably a good first step.

[edit1 - clarity] [edit2 - added link to kahn academy)

> "Lithium also makes you rock, if you take it long-term.

My other friend called me up recently to tell me that she'd just bought supplemental lithium. She thought she was bipolar and needed more lithium. 12 hours later she called again, sobbing: suicidal. I told her she shouldn't have taken the lithium, and that it would probably wear off. She searched and found adverse symptoms associated with her supplement. I don't think she'll take that one again.

> The GF is on a mood stabiliser called Depakote.

That's what my friend was forced to take. She's been off it for nine months, and doesn't miss it.

Another response to my comment, from /u/eliasmacpherson, gets into orthomolecular psychiatry and "histadelics" (histamine, allergies) as an important causative factor in "mental health problems". That thread might be really valuable to you as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27993001

> OK, so they're ranting specifically about US prescribing practices, the DSM, and the US drug industry. They're focused on anti-psychotics.

The essence of Robert Whitaker's books, Mad in America, Anatomy of an Epidemic, and Psychiatry Under the Influence, is that Psychiatry got idealogically-captured by the drug industry, and how psychiatric drugs arguably take episodic conditions and make them chronic.

Whitaker's initial forays into "mental health" was when he looked into Prozac as a reporter for the Boston Globe (newspaper). The trials for Prozac found that it makes some patients suicidal. The Germans FDA-equivalent wouldn't approve it...

Whitaker's organization spotlights more effective approaches to treatment.

> So I see my role as basically "support".

Often times it's hard for patients to notice how adversely affected they are by their medications, but the doctors thinks the medications are working fantastically even though the patient would have gotten better anyways, with just time and a normal diet. Followup visits are opportunities for injecting additional perspective... "What are you going to talk to the doctor about today?" might be a useful question to ask.

Thanks for your comment.

Thanks for your response. Sorry to hear about your GF's experience. "Sectioned"... .. . Mental Health Act -> you're in the U.K.?

> she'll be taking the mood-stabiliser until she dies

"Mood stabiliser" is a marketing term. My friend was on a "mood stabiliser" until the 2nd to last time she escaped. She didn't have those pills with her when she hopped the fence, so she couldn't take them when she was in hiding at my place. She was perfectly "stable" without the drug, so they dropped it from her treatment program at the next visit & she felt better.

> But the anti-psychotic is troublesome. [...]

Whitaker points out that psychotic patients who do the best are those who are never put on anti-psychotics. Those who do second-best are those who are taken off the anti-psychotic promptly. Those who do the worst are those who are "maintained" on anti-psychotics indefinitely.

Random link to Whitaker's organization: https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/05/psychiatry-defends-its-...

>> But the doctors kept her on tranquilizers anyways.

> That sounds wrong to me.

I refer to anti-psychotics as tranquilizers, because Robert Whitaker points out that the drugs that got re-labeled as the first generation anti-psychotics were originally used as tranquilizers. Maybe this doesn't accurately reflect how today's patients are told about the medicines they're given, but it's better for being dismissive of their inappropriate use.

> I hope the shrink weans her off the anti-psychotic soon; I don't think she needs it.

You're almost certain to have help with this: look for a psychiatrist for a second opinion, someone with experience with tapering patients off psychiatric medications. Let the guy know that you're advocating for your GF, and are prepared to complain to licensing boards/etc...

I may have been overly-aggressive in my personal efforts. No one cared, but I don't know that a softer, gentler approach might've been more effective.

Since this is all sort of new for you, I'm happy to read your questions and see if I have any insights for you. I've been at this for almost 6 years... You may also find my comment history useful. hth. :)

Thanks for your comment. I don't have a success story yet, but I'm optimistic. I've learned a lot, and hope to leverage my 'trial by fire' to help others.

> Carl C Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer "considered himself a founder of what [Linus Pauling] named orthomolecular psychiatry" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Pfeiffer_(pharmacologist)

> he blames the substance abuse on the histadelics

hmm? Searching for histadelics: "If you’re lying in bed at night hoping for sleep, but your brain won't stop, this can be the chatter of histamine expressing itself. Histamine is metabolized through methylation. When histamine levels increase, the pool of available methyl donors can be depleted..." [0]

Oh, how helpful. Thanks, I hadn't really looked into this a whole lot. The old anti-histamine drug cyproheptadine is also an anti-serotonin drug, many people have problems with "serotonin syndrome" that are really helped with this safe prescription. Serotonin and histamine must have some important interaction, I'll have to look into this more.

Another interesting quote from [0] (my comments are sometimes my notes that I go back to...):

"An interesting and illustrative anecdote on folate and histamine was observed by the late Carl Pfeiffer, M.D. who was a leader in this field. He reported that he and his colleagues were puzzled that so many histadelic patients relapsed in the summer months. Eventually, the reason was found to lie in the increase of dietary folate that was found in green, leafy salad vegetables that people ate throughout the summer months."

[0] https://www.natures-source.com/blog/post/histadelia-a-primer...

> I'll try this levomefolic acid.

This site seemed useful when I ran across it a few months ago: https://mthfr.net/

All this study says is that stressed teenagers who don't know how to cope become stressed adults who don't know how to cope. People display more psychotic attributes when they don't have the resiliency associated with being a teenager. Emotional stress is the primary cause behind "psychotic breaks" and "schizophrenia" (a worthless diagnosis). Stressed brains need more fuel, derived from glucose, b-vitamins, etc.

> The precise causes of illnesses such as schizophrenia are largely unknown, although genetics and brain-based factors are known to play an essential role.

My understanding is Psychosis is basically a metabolic disorder: people become psychotic when their brain runs out of fuel.

When I first met my friend who taught me about "mental illness", I thought she was 'high as a kite'. As the months went on, I noticed she was most chatty ("psychotic") when she was using crack cocaine. I didn't know about the term "psychosis" at the time, or that cocaine shreds the mitochondria [2][3]. When the effects of cocaine wore off, she was basically normal. When we ate well, she did pretty well. It wasn't until she ran out of alcohol that she became profoundly psychotic.

The involuntary doctors said, essentially, 'Patient expects us to believe that she was psychotic because she was drinking 2 bottles of liquor a day, and using cocaine. We know that this is not the case because we previously got her stabilized on medicine 5 years ago and 7 years ago. After those year-long orders for treatment she discontinued services. Here it is, 4 years later and she's back in the mental hospital. She's clearly been psychotic this whole time.'

I read that one of the problems of psychiatry is that they usually see people when they're at their worst, thereby missing that they were mostly functional just before they fell apart.

One of the early nutritional treatments for schizophrenia was Niacin. Psychiatrists who think in terms of drugs managed to torpedo this line of research, so our doctors tend to not think in terms of physiology. But the research is still being done:

Two-decade-long study links lack of vitamin B3 to schizophrenia among Indians - https://researchmatters.in/news/two-decade-long-study-links-...

Successful treatment of schizophrenia requires optimal daily doses of vitamin B3 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19238764/

Nutrition, NAD and exercise: vitamin B3 supplements to stay fit and healthy? - https://www.endocrinology.org/endocrinologist/135-spring20/f...

My friend eventually figured out that she's a poor methylator whose genetics are such that she can't turn folic acid (a shelf-stable provitamin B-9 used to fortify foods) into L-Methyl-Folate. (My previous comments said the treatment providers ran this test [1][2]. She later corrected me: new clients at the treatment center were getting their cheeks swabbed, she wanted to be swabbed too. The test came back that she needed methylated B-9. She'd previously said it was like flipping a switch from 'depressed' to 'not-depressed'.) But the doctors kept her on tranquilizers anyways.

Just last month she convinced her doctors to take her off tranquilizers. What's wrong with Psychiatry, that they think people become broken and require palliative treatments for the rest of their lives? Do any of you have any insights?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23859585

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15591378

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22132272

Stimulants -- amphetamines, cocaine, etc -- have physiological effects sort-of similar to Mono Amine Oxidase Inhibitors (MAOI). MAOIs were sold as the first generation of anti-depressant drugs. These substances have mood-elevating benefits sort-of similar to cocaine and amphetamine, but without the euphoria and crash.

Later generations of anti-depressants are less effective that the MAOIs, but MAOIs fell out use because doctors of that era tended to think newer==better, some MAOIs caused side effects when combined with fermented foods (fine cheese, etc), and patents allowed for a marketing budget for the pharmaceutical companies to promote their latest FDA-approved prescriptions to physicians.

Stimulants do their harm by shredding the mitochondria [0]. My observations are that Cocaine is a much safer stimulant than meth amphetamine.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18211048

Emotional stress is a very important driver of substance abuse. Anything that restores the mitochondria/metabolism helps with stimulant abuse. Most important is helping the person find meaning.

I agree that taking action is very important for fixing problems.

Managing emotional stress is an important part of maintaining a pregnancy. My sister-in-law was also doing other therapeutic interventions. I think the final piece of her puzzle was letting go of needing to perform.

I think doing nothing special would have been more appropriate for the coronavirus: aggressive ventilation killed a lot of patients in New York. Fever hospitals [0] would have saved a lot of lives.

Problems are easier to solve when they are correctly understood.

[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Lets-bring-back-Britains...

My brother recently had his first kid... I think it was 4-6 years of 'trying'. His wife got pregnant the month after she had her IUD pulled, but miscarried in the first trimester. I think she had at least two or three more miscarriages, they didn't share the details with me.

Then they went for 'assisted reproduction' (in-vitro fertilization [IVF]). The first implantation lasted for a couple months, then she miscarried. The later embryos didn't take (I think they tried 2 more IVF cycles, from the frozen embryos). Eventually they gave up and started getting ready for adoption.

I went over to their house last Mothers day. They put ultrasound pictures in the box to surprise my mom. A older female friend of mine says she's seen this happen all the time: give up on 'trying', and the pregnancy will appear.

My brother and sister-in-law don't really talk to me about medical things, and I don't tell them where they're off. But I think her IUD was the "chemical castration" variety (plastic with the levonorgestrel, brand name Mirena). I never told them, "you shouldn't have trusted the pharmaceutical-industrial complex to not take your fertility away prematurely", as it was too late for that.

Progestins are sold to women as hormones that regulate their menstrual cycles, but really they're imitation hormones that suppress the menstrual cycle. Most modern women don't want a dozen pregnancies, most modern men don't want a herd of children to take care of, so FDA-approved fake hormones are an easy sell. But if we're actually concerned about the trend line from hyper-fertile to sub-fertile, being honest with women about what's in their "birth control" prescriptions is a good start.

[I hereby take credit for the anonymous edit that fixed the introduction of the Wikipedia entry for Progestogen. The fix has persisted across the years. Many others have come along to reword the introduction. Someone inserted a clarification to my edit to say that fake-hormones are used in Medicine, but my word insertion and reference are still there :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progestogen ]

(minor edits)

> why demonise it?

ECT is a palliative treatment that does not address any of the causes of the patients' actual problems. While some patients seem to benefit, some are grievously harmed. The precautionary principle, and ethical guidelines, should eliminate this form of modern bloodletting from the therapeutic arsenal.