followed by four months in a halfway house. Eventually he returned to live with friends in a collective house in North Oakland, California. By that time he was on lithium for mood-stabilization and the antidepressant Wellbutrin (bupropion).
Stabilized with the help of medications, at age 27 he began to study books about his condition. He studied psychopharmacology to understand the chemistry of the illness. He wrote, “I started coming to terms with the paradox that, however much contempt I feel toward the pharmaceutical industry for making a profit from manic-depressive people’s misery and however much I aspire to be living outside the system, the drugs help keep me alive, and in the end I’m so thankful for them.”
Sascha also studied books that helped patients and their families with creating lives that work. He was especially inspired to read about the connection between creative genius and bipolar disorder. Authors such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, and painters like Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock all experienced serious mental imbalances and channeled their eccentricities into creative expressions that have offered profound sources of inspiration to many exposed to them.
Sascha wondered how to help teenagers find inspiration and support—especially those not exposed to the study and perspectives he had gained. He then went on to co-coordinate “The Icarus Project (www.TheIcarusProject.com),” a place for people like himself to connect, tell stories, and create a shared language that reflects both “the complexity and the brilliance that we hold inside.”
Although Sascha has found a way to positively contribute to society, he has to monitor himself and make sure he lives a life with a balanced diet and enough sleep, exercise, and time in nature, as well as the right balance of psychiatric medications. He has developed the self-discipline to monitor his lifestyle choices and make himself do what he needs to do for himself. He lives knowing that if he fails to provide for himself in these ways, he might again slip into an episode that is destructive to him and others.
How Much Mental Illness Do We Have and What are We Doing About It?
According to the National Institute of Mental Health’s “National Survey on Drug Use and Health” of 2008, serious mental illness (SMI) cripples almost 5% of the population. They defined SMI as “a mental, behavioral or emotional disorder resulting in serious functional impairment that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities and was diagnosable within the last year.” Five percent of the population of 311,500,000 today (mid-2011), is more than 15.5 million people in the USA now experiencing serious mental health issues.
A 2004 study revealed the outcome of first-episode psychosis in USA, treated in the usual way primarily with drugs: Only 13.7% of subjects met full recovery criteria for two years or longer (Robinson et al., 2004).
Robert Whitaker, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010), which made him the winner of a 2011 national award for investigative journalism, reported it this way: In 1955, when psychiatric medications were not yet used, there were 355,000 people [in the USA] with a psychiatric diagnosis primarily cared for in state and county mental hospitals. Four million American adults under 65 years of age are on Supplementary Security Income (SSI) today because they are disabled by mental illness. One in every fifteen young adults (18-26 years old) is “functionally impaired” by mental illness. Some 250 children and adolescents are added to the SSI rolls daily because of mental illness.
Psychiatric drugs are now being given more frequently to children. Dr. Mercola wrote a special report on Ritalin on June 30, 2011 (available through Mercola.com). He reported:
Consider the drug Ritalin (used for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). U.S. pharmacists distribute five times more Ritalin than the rest of the world combined, according to Dr. Samuel Epstein's Cancer Prevention Coalition (CPC). In all, 60 to 90 percent of U.S. kids with attention deficit disorders are prescribed this powerful drug, which amounts to 3 percent to 5 percent of U.S. children and teens on Ritalin.
By definition, Ritalin stimulates your central nervous system, leading to side effects such as: increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, increased body temperature, increased alertness, and suppressed appetite. Research has also linked Ritalin with more severe health problems such as cancer as well as an increased probability of suicidal thoughts and behavior. Ritalin has the same pharmacological profile as cocaine, yet its effects are even more potent. Using brain imaging, scientists have found that, in pill form, Ritalin occupies more of the neural transporters responsible for the "high" experienced by addicts than smoked or injected cocaine.
Unfortunately, diagnosing ADHD really comes down to a matter of opinion, as there is no physical test, like a brain scan, that can pinpoint the condition. There's only subjective evaluation, so it's easy for kids to be misdiagnosed.
As for antidepressants, they have been shown to cause both suicidal and homicidal thoughts and behaviors. For example, seven of the last 12 school shootings in the USA were done by children who were either on antidepressants or going through withdrawal from using them.
Whitaker reports that the increase in the use of psychiatric medications has led to a rise in disability and clearly, a fattening of the bank accounts of pharmaceutical companies. Whitaker wrote, “In 1985, outpatient sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics in the US amounted to $503 million. Twenty-three years later, US sales of antidepressants and antipsychotics reached $24.2 billion, nearly a fiftyfold increase. Total sales of all psychotropic drugs in 2008 topped $40 billion” (p. 320).
The following is reprinted from a section of the introduction in Spiritism and Mental Health (Bragdon, 2012):
We are currently facing a sharp increase in the cost of health care, as well as an exponential increase in people on disability because of mental health issues. In the USA, our conventional medical establishments have the resources to administer excellent emergency medical care, but, according to the World Health Organization (2000) our overall health system performance ranks 37th, and Americans rank 72nd in overall level of health compared to 191 countries—even though we have the most expensive health care system in the world. We can extrapolate that our knowledge and practices regarding the healing of mental illness and chronic degenerative physical disease is not exemplary.
This obviously signals a need to look outside our borders for ideas about how to improve our health care systems, to prevent disease and maintain wellness. Possibly we can also learn more about the causes of illness.
Whitaker (2010)…reflects that our top medical authorities still do not know the real cause of mental illness. While many benefit from conventional psychotropic drugs the majority of individuals who use these powerful medications do not experience significant or sustained improvement or are unable to tolerate their long-term use because of associated toxicity and serious adverse effects including weight gain, loss of libido, gastro-intestinal distress, and in some cases, worsening of the mental health problem for which they are being treated. Whitaker suggests that conventional psychiatry relies too heavily on psychotropics and too little on viable non-pharmacologic alternatives:
The drugs may alleviate symptoms over the short term, and there are some people who may stabilize well over the long term on them, and so clearly there is a place for the drugs in psychiatry’s toolbox…However, (given the long-term outcome research) psychiatry would have to admit that the drugs, rather than fix chemical imbalances in the brain, perturb the normal functioning of neurotransmitter pathways…[Psychiatry has to figure out] how to use the medications judiciously and wisely, and everyone in our society would understand the need for alternative therapies that don’t rely
