Please be aware that NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) believes that 80% of people with mental illness should be taking medication, and NAMI receives significant funding from pharmaceutical companies.
NAMI states that “mental illness is a serious medical illness.” It is not.
“Mental” means “mind,” which is the immaterial part of you. It is your organized conscious and unconscious. The mind is manifest as thought, perception, emotion, will, memory, imagination and reasoning. These are not physical attributes.
“Medical” relates to physicians and medicine. Physicians prescribe drugs to change your body. Mental illness is not of the body; it is of the mind. While it emanates from the brain, mental illness is not a brain disease.
Your psyche is your soul, personality or mind. For treatment of psychological problems, seek out spiritual counselors or psychotherapists who will join you in thinking, reasoning and remembering.
Once you start taking drugs, you become susceptible to what Dr. Peter Breggin calls “medication spell-binding,” that is, your ability to think critically and reason well becomes corrupted. In other words, you become unable to realize that your drugs are hurting you, so you just keep taking them and hurting yourself.
I know. I took antidepressants every day for 26 years. I never completed my education, developed a career, married or had children. My life was lost in the antidepressant pill bottle.
About annecwoodlen
I am a tenth generation American, descended from a family that has been working a farm that was deeded to us by William Penn. The country has changed around us but we have held true. I stand in my grandmother’s kitchen, look down the valley to her brother’s farm and see my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Hannah standing on the porch. She is holding the baby, surrounded by four other children, and saying goodbye to her husband and oldest son who are going off to fight in the Revolutionary War. The war is twenty miles away and her husband will die fighting. We are not the Daughters of the American Revolution; we were its mothers.
My father, Milton C. Woodlen, got his doctorate from Temple University in the 1940’s when—in his words—“a doctorate still meant something.” He became an education professor at West Chester State Teachers College, where my mother, Elizabeth Hope Copeland, had graduated. My mother raised four girls and one boy, of which I am the middle child. My parents are deceased and my siblings are estranged.
My fiancé, Robert H. Dobrow, was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps. In 1974, his plane crashed, his parachute did not open, and we buried him in a cemetery on Long Island. I could say a great deal about him, or nothing; there is no middle ground. I have loved other men; Bob was my soul mate.
The single greatest determinate of who I am and what my life has been is that I inherited my father’s gene for bipolar disorder, type II. Associated with all bipolar disorders is executive dysfunction, a learning disability that interferes with the ability to sort and organize. Despite an I.Q. of 139, I failed twelve subjects and got expelled from high school and prep school. I attended Syracuse University and Onondaga Community College and got an associate’s degree after twenty-five years. I am nothing if not tenacious.
Gifted with intelligence, constrained by disability, and compromised by depression, my employment was limited to entry level jobs. Being female in the 1960’s meant that I did office work—billing at the university library, calling out telegrams at Western Union, and filing papers at a law firm. During one decade, I worked at about a hundred different places as a temporary secretary. I worked for hospitals, banks, manufacturers and others, including the county government. I quit the District Attorney’s Office to manage a gas station; it was more honest work.
After Bob’s death, I started taking antidepressants. Following doctor’s orders, I took them every day for twenty-six years. During that time, I attempted%2
Behind the Locked Doors of Inpatient Psychiatry 
Nice post Anne. How ridiculous is it that they get away with that statement, “mental illness is a real medical illness.” Hogwash. Way to needlessly clonfuse an already difficult subject.