Recovery Michigan

Welcome to Crazy Meds, where you can learn what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s just interesting, weird and funny about neurological and psychiatric medications.

This is the beta of Version 2. Released much sooner than I wanted as far too many of the pages that haven’t changed much since 2004 are no longer viewable with IE 8, Firefox 4, Chrome, and maybe other browsers. So there are lots of heroically fugly pages, dead-ends, unfinished & barely started pages, and a general atmosphere of ADD, chaos and confusion. In other words, it’s early 2004 all over again, only with less chance of my landing in the lock ward.

If you know the name of the medication(s) you’re looking for, you’ll probably want our list of drugs by name. It’s pretty big, with all the meds we know about to treat various conditions. The list is more-or-less in alphabetical order, by both generic and brand name, and includes all the brand/trade names we can find for every med.

Listen and call in to talk with psychiatric survivors, dissident mental health professionals and others who want a nonviolent revolution in the mental health system!

The Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH) recently received a federal grant to combine all benefit plans for persons who receive both Medicaid and Medicare benefits, those persons referred to as "dual eligibles."

Last month MDCH convened several forums to gather stakeholder input about efforts to integrate care for this popluation of people.Two additional forums have been scheduled for later this month - one in the greater Lansing area and one in Detroit - to allow for increased stakeholder input.

The job was gone, the gun was loaded, and a voice was saying, “You’re a waste, give up now, do it now.”

It was a command, not a suggestion, and what mattered at that moment — a winter evening in 2000 — was not where the voice was coming from, but how assured it was, how persuasive.

Losing his first decent job ever seemed like too much for Joe Holt to live with. It was time.

“All I remember then is a knock on the bedroom door and my wife, Patsy, she sits down on the bed and hugs me, and I’m holding the gun in my left hand, down here, out of sight,” said Mr. Holt, 50, a computer consultant and entrepreneur who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

59.5% of antidepressant prescriptions were made with no diagnosis in 1996, in 2007 the figure rose to 72.7%, researchers reported in Health Affairs. Antidepressant drugs are today the third most commonly prescribed class of drugs in the USA

A historic settlement victory for disabled Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has been achieved, the NVLSP (National Veterans Legal Services Program) has announced. The class action lawsuit Sabo versus United States is good news for thousands of ex-servicemen and women who were medically discharged due to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) between 2003 and 2008 - these people did not get the benefits they were entitled to.

PAIs are intentional activities such as performing acts of kindness, practicing optimism, and counting one's blessing gleaned from decades of research into how happy and unhappy people are different. This new approach has the potential to benefit depressed individuals who don't respond to pharmacotherapy or are not able or willing to obtain treatment, is less expensive to administer, is relatively less time-consuming and promises to yield rapid improvement of mood symptoms, holds little to no stigma, and carries no side effects.

One of the main networks of dissident mental health professionals, psychiatrists, psychologists is ISEPP (formerly International Center for Study of Psychiatry and Psychology - ICSPP). ISEPP is a long-time sponsor organization of MindFreedom International. Many speakers are MFI members, including MFI director David Oaks

Principles for Staying Sane While Effectively Helping a Loved One in Crisis

Wednesday, July 27, 2011 2:00-3:00 PM EST, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM PST

 

Do you have a family member or friend who has been through (or is undergoing) a mental health crisis?  If so, you are familiar with how difficult and frustrating it can be to watch someone you love suffer.  

At first, we are more than ready to give of our time and resources.  We almost feel compelled to step in and manage aspects of the person's life for him or her.  Soon, we wonder why he or she "just can't snap out of it," and finally risk becoming resentful if our selfless acts don't add up to less suffering for our loved one.  

In this webinar, participants will learn principles that, when applied thoughtfully in real-life situations, can help both their loved ones stay on a healing path while helping themselves avoid burnout & withdrawal. 

Hornstein: I try to understand people as they understand themselves. If you ask them what their experience is or read their own accounts, you’ll find they can be articulate and psychologically sophisticated. Even people who lack formal education can offer highly nuanced descriptions of their emotional lives. I’ve adopted a phrase from my uk colleagues: “experts of their own experience.” This view helps me avoid either romanticizing their experience — seeing it in a more positive way than they do — or seeing it only as a tragedy with no redemptive qualities.

Emotional distress is highly individualized, and we shouldn’t come to any general conclusions about it. There are people who feel they’ve learned something profound from the experience of hearing voices, but there are plenty of others who are frightened and just want the voices to go away