It’s a word that has a wide range of associations, including some pretty negative or dismissive ones.

Many people connect “psychic” with storefront charlatans and stage performers. The Wikipedia page defines a psychic, also called a sensitive, as a person “who professes an ability to perceive information hidden from the normal senses.”

In our interview, Judith Orloff, MD noted she had psychic abilities at an early age, but her family did not encourage her to develop them. She is now integrating those talents with traditional medicine, and is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, has a private practice, and leads workshops on intuitive ability and healing.

She thinks psychic ability can be used for life enhancement, and agrees with a quote of Jean Houston (from our interview) that “a lot of giftedness, though by no means all, has to do with having a broader palette of perceptual capacity, being highly sensitive to all the senses.”

But Dr. Orloff thinks “it goes beyond the senses, as we know it. It’s our ability to intuit the mystery. And it’s through our capacity to intuit the mystery that we know cosmic truths about ourselves. And it’s exactly the same thing as creativity.”

Continued: Psychic Ability and Creativity: Going Beyond the Senses.

~ ~

“Many more people are highly sensitive than realize it. Besides being empaths, HSPs are gifted in many ways.

“They write, play music, engage in practicing the healing arts, paint, sculpt and so much more. Inherently creative with a knack for seeing what others can’t… Being HSP is not a curse, burden or life sentence to being out-of-synch with the world.”

From article What Everyone Needs to Know About Highly Sensitive People (HSPs), By Sarah Dolliver.
~~

Shyness is one of a number of personal qualities that Malick shares with many other creative and gifted people.

In a recent profile article, writer Steven Zeitchik notes that friends and collaborators ‘paint a portrait of the reclusive filmmaker as a complicated and contradictory man…

‘The director dislikes being photographed, avoids public appearances — he skipped the premiere of his highly anticipated, long-delayed “Tree” last week here at the Cannes Film Festival — and turns down all interview requests (including this one), creating an impression of a cranky, precious artist.

‘But conversations with nearly a dozen friends and collaborators reveal a different portrait of the 67-year-old director who has made only five movies in nearly four decades: “Badlands,” “Days of Heaven,” “The Thin Red Line,” “The New World” and now “Tree.”‘

These people who know him say he is ‘painfully shy in public but jovial on his sets, gentle but fiercely driven.’

Continued in The Creative Personality: Director Terrence Malick

~~

“But I was a highly sensitive child, and the last thing my parents wanted was for their child to go in and get hurt…

“Most actors are highly sensitive people, but you have this incredible scrutiny. You have to develop a thick skin, but you can’t have a thick skin in your work. So it’s that constant push-pull…”

Continued in Inner Actor post Nicole Kidman on fame and actors as highly sensitive people

“It’s really tough to suddenly be very famous. I think you get this feeling like you have to kind of be what everyone thinks you are, and if you slow down, then it’s all going to go away.”

Read more of her thoughtful comments and perspectives on being an actor, and the kinds of pressures affecting her life – and so many other talented and sensitive artists – in the Inner Actor post Winona Ryder on staying sane with so much attention and work.

Once upon a time, HSPs might have been written off as shy or even neurotic, but Aron [Elaine Aron, author of The Highly Sensitive Person] believes these labels are demeaning and inaccurate. Shyness, she says, is a learned response; HSPs are born with a heightened sensitivity meter.

Kirwan-Taylor notes that an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the population suffers from the condition, a choice of phrase indicative of our cultural tendency to pathologize sensitivity.

I should confess that when I first heard about HSP, it reminded me of the first time I learned about ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), which I felt was just another way of saying “bratty child.”

This time, my thinking went something like, “They’re trying to turn those irritating people who force others to walk on eggshells into bona fide victims.”

But I kept reading, and the more I read, the more I began to think that the HSP label explained a lot — about me, about my siblings, and about many of my friends.

Aron’s argument is that there are a lot of us whose feelings get hurt easily, and that this huge sector of the population is mistakenly being written off as weak and thin-skinned.

But as with ADD (attention deficit disorder) and even ODD, sooner or later society catches up with science and accepts that these terms are more than a fashionable excuse for being difficult or neurotic.

Though not currently classified as a disorder, HSP will, I suspect, soon become a part of the psychological lexicon.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (where you challenge your negative thoughts with logic), as well as antidepressants, can also help.

Sadly, sensitivity may indeed become part of the canon of psychiatric disorders as psychiatry expands its definitions of mental illness and narrows the range of normalcy.

Highly sensitive persons, or HSPs, can be misdiagnosed with mental illnesses by professionals who are unfamiliar with the characteristics of sensitivity.

In spite of growing evidence that they are both ineffective and toxic, psychiatric drugs are often prescribed, sometimes resulting in permanent disability.

Ane Axford, LMFT, of SensitiveAndThriving.com, has another take on sensitivity in her blog post High Sensitivity vs. Disorder — Autoimmune, Emotional, Mental, Relational:

It is healthy to be sensitive.

Disorders are not a natural result of sensitivity and they are not the same thing as sensitivity. Disorders develop as a result of the context and highly sensitive people are the most vulnerable.

Everything can go REALLY deep when you are highly sensitive and it’s not healthy for everything to enter you.

Care for your highly sensitive self and respect your sensitivity.

Know that you are just right as you are and you can meet all of your own needs.

Understand yourself, connect to your self, and accept yourself completely…

You will see that not only can you function with sensitivity, you can thrive.

In fact, thriving is THE way to combat disorder. You thrive by being fully you.

Your joy, peace, talents, and authentic expression will come out and it will feel fabulous.

Language impacts our perceptions. The choice to describe our sensitivity, to ourselves and others, as part of our character versus a mental health condition, will have an effect on our capacity to flourish as highly sensitive people.

Related:

Posts:

Woman interrupted: misdiagnosis and medication of sensitivity and giftedness

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

Articles:

Highly Sensitive People – Traits and Characteristics

Books:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

~~

sensitivity and mental illness, highly sensitive books, high sensitivity personality, sensitivity and psychiatric drugs, Elaine Aron, Ane Axford

One of the other characters impacted by those abilities is Marie, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who revealed in a recent news story her own psychic experiences.

She knew early on in her mother’s pregnancy that she was about to become a big sister to twins, before a scan confirmed it.

Continued in Highly Sensitive site post Bryce Dallas Howard and Judith Orloff on psychic ability.

See the post Kristen Stewart and shyness and sensitivity for one example.

In her article Jesse Eisenberg on playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in ‘The Social Network’ (Los Angeles Times, Sept 27, 2010), Amy Kaufman described the actor as showing up for the interview irritated from accidentally seeing the last 30 seconds of the movie, that he had been avoiding it because he doesn’t like to watch his own performances.

“I’ve been so furious this whole morning about what I did in that scene,” Eisenberg said. “It’s just uncomfortable to watch me. Not in the same way that it’s uncomfortable to listen to your voice on an answering machine. I just felt that I didn’t get the scene right.”

Kaufman adds, “Given that the 26-year-old’s portrayal of an aloof, socially awkward Zuckerberg during the founding years of Facebook has already sparked some award buzz, Eisenberg’s self-critique may sound like typical false Hollywood modesty. Yet Eisenberg genuinely seems more panicked than excited by any acclaim.

“It feels like — and again, this is just the way my mind works, which is why I go to therapy twice a week — I immediately think that there could be nothing worse than getting that kind of attention,” he said.

“Because, how can you maintain that kind of level of interest and attention? And I really have worked hard and done well in other things that have gotten no attention. So it makes you feel like those kind of things are inconsistent.”

“It wasn’t important to us that Jesse do an impersonation of Mark Zuckerberg,” [screenwriter Aaron] Sorkin said in an e-mail. “Jesse came to work knowing the scene he had to do that day, and how he prepared — whether it was listening to Mark’s voice, fencing or standing on his head — was entirely up to him.”

But Eisenberg was exacting. During one scene in which his character is being deposed and has a notepad, he jotted down which takes he considered best.

For the 18 days of rehearsals and 72 days of shooting, [director David] Fincher said, Eisenberg was hyper-aware of his performance.

“He kept asking me, ‘Am I doing OK? Am I doing OK?’ And I was like, ‘Dude, ask anybody, if you’re not doing OK, I will let you know,’” Fincher said, laughing.

“I think he wouldn’t be as good as he is if he wasn’t hard on himself. But I hope he’ll get to enjoy it…. He got the very thing that we discussed time and time again about the film, which is: I want you to figure out a way to remain an enigma, and that’s a really hard thing.”

For more on the psychology and personality of acting and actors, see The Inner Actor.

Research is helping explain shyness in terms of brain physiology, particularly involving the amygdala (technically amygdalae) – a pair of structures in the limbic system that processes emotional reactions.

In his article The Evolution of Anxiety, Rich Presta explains, “Whenever you get input from your senses, it gets sent to two different parts of your brain for analysis. One is the frontal cortex… The other is called the amygdala (uh-MIG-duh- luh), which is actually two nerve centers that look like almonds and are located on either side of the thalamus.”

He adds, “The amygdala is old. Real old. It’s part of what is often called the ‘reptilian brain’ because it’s been around since we were virtually reptiles ourselves, and one of the main jobs of the amygdala is assessing danger and keeping us safe.”

One of the key elements of anxiety is getting revved up with the “fight or flight” response that kept us safe from sabretooth tiger attacks – but we can still feel the response when “confronted” by a first date or a job review.

The article Shyness is inherited by Medical News Today reports that “researchers conducted brain scans on 22-year-olds and found that those who had been classified 20 years before as inhibited or shy children had a distinctive reaction in their brains when confronted with novel images.

“People who had been judged as toddlers to be inhibited showed in the scans that the amygdala structure in their brains responded much more actively to unexpected sights than did those subjects who had been judged as children to be more outgoing, said Jerome Kagan, a researcher in the department of psychology at Harvard University.”

The article adds, “Kagan also suggests that shyness is a temperament that can be inherited, but this temperament does not necessarily determine one’s eventual personality.”

“Sometimes because I am very shy, when I meet a director and they are shy too, we just sort of sit there.”

Sigourney Weaver

Maybe all this can help explain more about why so many of us were shy as children, and still feel it – often along with other forms of apprehension or anxiety.

See more info including videos in the post Anxiety and the Amygdala – anxiety relief programs.

It is important to note that shyness is not the same as introversion.

Laurie Helgoe notes in her Psychology Today article: “On the surface, introversion looks a lot like shyness. Both limit social interaction, but for differing reasons.

“The shy want desperately to connect but find socializing difficult, says Bernardo J. Carducci, professor of psychology and director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. Introverts seek time alone because they want time alone.

“An introvert and a shy person might be standing against the wall at a party, but the introvert prefers to be there, while the shy individual feels she has no choice.”  [From Revenge of the Introvert.]

Also see my post Shyness, Introversion, Sensitivity – What’s the Difference?

shyness, shy people, feeling shy, social phobia, social anxiety, timid, withdrawn, fear of people, shyness and amygdala

What are some of the reasons people stop taking medications??

What are the alternatives?

• My inner life, and sometimes my outer life, is painful/chaotic/confusing. The DSM symptoms list for certain mental illnesses seem to fit me so I must be ill.

The mental suffering of sensitive, creative and divergent children and adults is real. Existential depression, loneliness, and emotional overwhelm are very real, as are the complications arising from our use of behaviors and substances to alleviate our suffering.

These experiences don’t require a diagnosis of mental illness in order to be taken seriously. And treating our suffering doesn’t need to include tampering with our highly sensitive brains.

• It is a relief to be given a psychiatric diagnosis.

When I was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder I felt relieved. I thought I finally had an explanation for all the difficult relationships, mistakes and trauma in my life. And there were pills that would fix it all!

I trusted the medical professionals who interpreted my creative energy as mania and my mental energy as ‘racing thoughts,’ because they must know best.

Unaware of high sensitivity and the complex dynamics of giftedness and creativity, I was very self-critical and ashamed of myself.

I’d spent years in therapy and graduate school studying psychology, committed to understanding my mind and taking responsibility for what I thought were my failures and inability to ‘fit in.’ The bipolar diagnosis felt like a huge ‘pass.’ I had a ‘disease’ and it wasn’t my responsibility.

It’s challenging and often lonely to live in this world with a creative, sensitive brain. But it’s not a disease. I take responsibility for learning as much as possible about living a healthy, meaningful life as a gifted HSP in an often unsupportive world. Thankfully, there is much more information available to us now than in the past, and a growing community of people with similar challenges and gifts.

With the growing understanding of these issues, and the support of others with similar personality, I now have a self-concept based on my own interpretation of myself over my entire life, rather than on the opinion of psychiatric professionals who have had only brief encounters with me.

• I need relief now! There’s nothing else I can do but take medication.

When we go to a therapist or psychiatrist we are often in acute distress. Real healing of the mind and body take time, but when we’re suffering we’re especially vulnerable to doctors who may tell us that we have a disease, we need drugs and the drugs will help now.

What they are unlikely to tell us is that no disease has been proven in the case of mental illness, the drugs don’t really ‘cure’ but sedate and alter the brain, and effective alternatives exist.

Even the need for short-term drug intervention for suicidal and delusional patients might be overestimated. Studies have shown various supplemental, nutritional and alternative therapies to be as or more effective in relieving symptoms.

• My doctor must know what she’s talking about and she seems to really care about me.

The reality is that psychiatrists have no idea why and how the drugs they prescribe work, nor are they aware of their long-term effects and the data on their inefficacy.

We all need people who care about us, especially when we’re in emotional crisis, and mental health professionals are usually in that profession because of a sincere desire to alleviate suffering.

But perhaps someone trained by, and very often given perks by, drug corporations and the institutions they support, isn’t the most informed and objective resource.

• Not taking drugs to treat mental illness is as dangerous as not treating cancer or diabetes.

While not treating suicidality or other extreme states can be dangerous, the fact remains that mental illness is not like physical illness.

The question is, do psychiatric medications really treat life-threatening and severely debilitating states, or do they sedate and disable the brain, giving an illusion of improvement?

Might these drugs be even more dangerous than the ‘diseases’ they claim to treat?

• I think I have a mental illness as well as a creative/sensitive personality, so I need medications.

Sounds logical, but even if you decide you really have bipolar disorder or another mental illness, it’s a good idea to think twice before you choose how to treat it.

These drugs have many physical and psychological side effects (often discounted by psychiatrists as symptoms of the purported illness), and more or different drugs may be prescribed to deal with them.

• I just need to take drugs for a little while, then when I’m better I’ll stop.

Getting on psychiatric drugs may be easy, but getting off them can be hell.

It’s becoming clear, through the investigations of people like Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, that the prognosis for those on psychiatric medications is grim: a 10-25 year shorter life span, and the likelihood of permanent disability.

It takes some people years to taper off psychiatric medications, and some are never able to do so successfully. I was lucky – it took me a year of slow tapering to get off multiple psychiatric medications which had caused depression, intense anxiety, sleeplessness, diabetes, tinitus, digestive problems, cognitive dysfunction and more.

Now that I’m drug-free, I sleep, dream and experience my emotions again authentically, but I continue to experience some physical side effects from the medications and may for some time. It’s a long road to recovery.

• What are the alternatives?

There are orthomolecular psychiatrists who actually do tests to determine what underlying physical conditions may be responsible for mental distress.

There are also many books and organizations, some listed below, which provide information on behavioral, nutritional and supplemental alternatives to drugs.

Although supplements can have side effects and need to be carefully chosen, many have been used for thousands of years to effectively treat emotional and mental conditions.

There is life after psychiatric drugs. For me, it’s been a better life.

Related:

Posts:

Woman interrupted: misdiagnosis and medication of sensitivity and giftedness

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

Books:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications

Organizations:

Safe Harbor — Includes links to find medical doctors (by zip code) who can assist with helping people safely get off of psychiatric drugs and medical personnel who will treat people without the use of psychiatric drugs

Alternative to Meds Center — Residential psychiatric medication withdrawal with medical and naturopathic oversight in Sedona, Arizona

Green Mental Health — Holistically-centered mental health care system which reflects traditional environmental, humanitarian, and health conscious values

The Road Back — How to get off psychiatric drugs safely

Soteria House — Alternative and non-drug solutions for people diagnosed schizophrenic

Mind Freedom International — is a nonprofit organization that works to win human rights and provide alternatives for people labeled with psychiatric disabilities

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights
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sensitivity and psychiatric drugs, sensitivity and mental illness, sensitivity and drugs, sensitivity and giftedness, high sensitivity personality, mental health books, drug books, highly sensitive books

Are psychiatrists equipped to recognize and support creativity, high sensitivity and giftedness?

Who determines where creative intensity ends and mental illness begins?

Do medications put our creativity and sensitivity at risk?

Over a year and a half ago, I asked myself these questions as I began a journey back to a drug-free life after years on anti-depressants and other medications.

Misdiagnosis and medications

A few years ago I began seeing a well-meaning psychiatric Nurse Practioner who monitored my anti-depressants. At the time, I’d been on various antidepressants for about 14 years.

She had no experience working with giftedness or Highly Sensitive Personality, like most mental health professionals.

She had a calm, conservative, scientific personality, like many in her field – very different from my intense, expressive and sensitive personality.

Although I was recovering well from PTSD after repeated traumas, which would have accounted for any distress even in the absence of giftedness and sensitivity, I was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder type II. I was taken off Effexor rapidly, an antidepressant drug now known for severe withdrawal symptoms, and put on a number of major psychiatric medications.

Within a week I was in extreme physical pain, unable to sleep, and my mind was anxious and agitated beyond belief. Rather than question the wisdom of being on these medications at all, I chose to go into the hospital for a few days so the medications could be balanced and I could get used to them.

Out of the frying pan…

Had I known that the psychiatric ward of the hospital had no mattresses (they used hard industrial foam pads) so sleep was almost impossible, that I’d be awakened several times a night for ‘vitals,’ that the nutritional value of the food was very low, that there was no recreation provided beyond walking in a line around the perimeter of a windowless room once a day, and that I’d be lucky to have 15 minutes every few days to speak to a doctor, I wouldn’t have put myself into the hospital.

If you aren’t already mentally ill before going in, a psych ward can make you sick in no time.

No one told me that my diagnosis would make me uninsurable, that there was no scientific evidence that my brain needed any of these drugs, no evidence that my life would improve with them, and that my life expectancy would be shortened by 10-25 years.

The assumption was that drugs were the answer. Since I was my usual compliant, self-critical self I went along. I have always been a good patient, willing to accept the theories of others.

It seemed to me that I finally had an answer to the complex challenges of my life.

Problem solved?

Having accepted that I had an incurable mental illness, I made plans to improve my life as much as possible. In a couple of years, I  moved across country and started a new life.

I began to write again and received two awards for my work at a major writers conference. I lost 40 pounds, took singing lessons and began work on a novel. But I couldn’t keep up any semblance of mental clarity or focus and my health kept deteriorating.

A couple of years later, I realized that I was in more emotional and physical distress than ever before even though I was on multiple medications. I had horrendous bouts of anxiety and agitation, along with diabetes, tinnitus, digestive problems, sleeplessness, tics and other symptoms, none of which I’d ever had before.

This made no sense. I began to do research into the psychiatric drugs I’d been prescribed and concluded that not only were they not necessary, they had actually been making me ill, in many cases giving me the very symptoms they were supposed to relieve.

Who am I really?

Initially, I sought out information on alternatives to drug treatment for bipolar disorder, still convinced the label fit.

At the same time, I began to learn more about high sensitivity, giftedness and creativity, through websites like HighlySensitive.org, HighAbility.org, and by reading the work of Elaine Aron and others. I started to look at myself in a new way.

I came to believe that my personality was normal for a gifted, creative person with high sensitivities, and I began to question the bipolar label I’d been given.

Maybe there were good reasons I have such intense emotions, and have had a hard time settling on a career and finding friends and romantic partners who fit me. I also learned that many others with personalities like mine had been caught up in the mental health system in the same way.

I began to ask the questions I’ve mentioned above, and to challenge my own negative self-concept.

Drug free

The answers I came up with led me to make a commitment to get off all psychiatric drugs, and to re-evaluate my attitude toward psychiatry and psychotherapy. As a former grad student in psychology, having studied to be a therapist, this was a big change. I had to take a hard look at my own unquestioning acceptance of the traditional approach to mental health.

Even wiith a number of supplements and good nutritional support, it took me a year to slowly withdraw from the drugs, much longer than the psychiatrist had told me to take (psychiatrists generally don’t recognize the addictive nature of psychoactive medications).

The process was difficult with lots of withdrawal symptoms, but I’m drug free and grateful to be facing life’s challenges with a mind and emotions that I can truly call my own.

Finding support

Like so many others who’ve challenged the authority of the mental health establishment, when I told my psychiatrist of my decision and asked for his help in withdrawing from the medications, I found myself in a position similar to those accused of witchcraft a few hundred years ago: everything I said was taken as further proof of my pathology.

After all, bipolar patients are notoriously non-compliant when it comes to medication, right? Supposedly, people with bipolar disorder long for mania and hate being made ‘normal.’ And how could I possible know more about myself than my doctor?

I felt it would be beneficial to see a mental health professional while I withdrew from the medications, but aside from recommending which medications to withdraw from first, my psychiatrist wasn’t interested in participating in my healing process.

I looked elsewhere and finally found a Jungian therapist who has been supportive of my taking back control over my physical and emotional health.

Most of my support has come from the growing number of organizations, authors and online communities who are working to reveal the truth about the inefficacy and dangers of psychiatric medications and psychiatry’s intimate relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, and who provide information on alternative treatments.

Scientologists, and their Citizens Commission on Human Rights, aren’t the only ones concerned about psychiatry and its drug-based paradigm of care.  There is a  world-wide movement to inform the public about the dangers of psychiatric drugs.

Listed below are just a few of the organizations currently involved in advocating for patients rights, exposing the pharmaceutical industry’s role in inventing and broadening categories of mental illness, and shining a light on the long term effects of psychiatric drug use and the actual results of drug studies.

The narrowing of normal

People who are creative and gifted often don’t fit within society’s common definitions of ‘normal.’

And while some may embrace their uniqueness, others, like myself, may struggle for years trying to change themselves in order to fit in.

In Peter D. Kramer on normality and mental health, Kramer, author of  Listening to Prozac and Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. notes the ever-diminishing concept of ‘normal.’

I have been thinking a good deal about normality lately. It’s a concern in the medical world. The complaint is that doctors are abusing [their] privilege, to define the normal.

Ordinary sadness, critics say, has been engulfed by depression. Boyishness stands in the shadow of attention deficits. Social phobia has engineered a hostile takeover of shyness.

Anatomy of an Epidemic

Another author whose work has illuminated my own road to better mental health is journalist Robert Whitaker. In his Huffington Post article, Anatomy Of An Epidemic’: Could Psychiatric Drugs Be Fuelling A Mental Illness Epidemic?, he takes a look at psychiatry’s track record:

The number of adults, ages 18 to 65, on the federal disability rolls due to mental illness jumped from 1.25 million in 1987 to four million in 2007. Roughly one in every 45 working-age adults is now on government disability due to mental illness.

This epidemic has now struck our nation’s children, too. The number of children who receive a federal payment because of a severe mental illness rose from 16,200 in 1987 to 561,569 in 2007, a 35-fold increase.

I wrote Anatomy of an Epidemic to investigate this epidemic, and this pursuit necessarily raises a very uncomfortable question. Although we, as a society, believe that psychiatric medications have “revolutionized” the treatment of mental illness, the disability numbers suggest a very different possibility. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling this epidemic?

This does not mean that antipsychotics don’t have a place in psychiatry’s toolbox. But it does mean that psychiatry’s use of these drugs needs to be rethought, and fortunately, a model of care pioneered by a Finnish group in western Lapland provides us with an example of the benefit that can come from doing so.

Twenty years ago, they began using antipsychotics in a selective, cautious manner, and today the long-term outcomes of their first-episode psychotic patients are astonishingly good. At the end of five years, 85% of their patients are either working or back in school, and only 20% are taking antipsychotics.

There is life beyond psychiatric medications. For me, it’s a better life.

Related:

Posts:

Giftedness, sensitivity and psychiatric drugs: why do we take them and why do we quit?

Misdiagnosis of the Gifted

Books:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications

Organizations:

Safe Harbor — Includes links to find medical doctors (by zip code) who can assist with helping people safely get off of psychiatric drugs and medical personnel who will treat people without the use of psychiatric drugs

Alternative to Meds Center — Residential psychiatric medication withdrawal with medical and naturopathic oversight in Sedona, Arizona

Green Mental Health — Holistically-centered mental health care system which reflects traditional environmental, humanitarian, and health conscious values

The Road Back — How to get off psychiatric drugs safely

Soteria House — Alternative and non-drug solutions for people diagnosed schizophrenic

Mind Freedom International — is a nonprofit organization that works to win human rights and provide alternatives for people labeled with psychiatric disabilities

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights

~~

sensitivity and psychiatric drugs, sensitivity and mental illness, sensitivity and drugs, sensitivity and giftedness, high sensitivity personality, mental health books, drug books, highly sensitive books