Mental Health - An Overdiagnosed & Overmedicated Crime

Professor Peter Gotzsche

Saturday, 14 February 2015. 12:00 PM - 2:30 PM

Yesterday I attended a talk by professor Peter Gotzsche, were he presented research data on drug induced human behaviour, which had led to suicide's & homicide's.

Explaining how the behaviour of psychiatrist's who collude with the criminal behaviour of the multinational drug companies, has created our current era of overdiagnosis & overmedication. With his real-life story of how the drug Prozac, as a medication treatment for depression, gained approval in Sweden after it was deemed dangerous and ineffective by authorities in Germany. Particularly disturbing for our sense of being involved in a civilized society.

As an "expert on internal medicine," Peter's description of himself, not mine. Peter described the behaviour of "big pharma," as the international pharmaceutical corporations, have come to be known to people who have struggled with the side effects, and dysfunctional behaviour, induced by powerful "neuroleptic" compounds.


With the commercial marketing of anti-psychotic and anti-depression medications (tranquillizing neuroleptic's) with a public image of science based research and trail tested data. Involving a profit driven collusion between some academic psychiatrist's and commercial drug houses, being much like the behaviour of the crime organization, known as, The Mafia. Which, for normal member's of the public, who only see the image of mental health presented by the "fourth estate," (the media) in their role of defending civilization, will feel like a totally irresponsible comparison. A scandalous accusation to make about the reality of our current treatment of human mental health. In our accepted "medical" view of human behaviour.

Spiritual & Scientific Pictures of God - Within

William Blake's picture of God
"I sought pleasure and found pain unutterable"

PSYCHOSIS: A Madness of Spiritual Crisis?

Or the Inconsequential Product of a Brain Disease?

The Altered State Delusions of a Mental Illness?

And does the current "treatment oriented" science of brain pathology find what it expects to see? While ignoring any other scientific inquiry which does not embrace its own particular, "material" worldview? Is our current pathology oriented science of mental experience based on a desire to understand human experience, or is it based on a non-conscious, primary process, avoidance impulse?

Curiously, when reading: The Recognition and Management of Early Psychosis, one finds not one single reference to developmental science literature. And despite psychiatric hypothesis of affective and non-affective psychosis, one finds no comment or reference to developmental science books like: Affect Regulation & the Origins of the Self. With its many references to the autonomic nervous system, suggesting the body is as intimately involved in the experience of psychosis, as the brain. And is that because, we all, simply "rationalize" our own self-preservation needs?



While our Western cultural history, seems to be in active denial about our inner reality. Perhaps because, in our Western religious tradition, the Body is a House of Sin? Yet consider this Guardian newspaper article from which Blake's picture of God is taken: The muscular old man with compasses often taken to be Blake's God is actually meant to be everything God is not. Writes Mark Vernon

Psychosis: A new model of lived experience

Psychosis: Affective States of Consciousness & Nervous System Dysregulation
The title of my academic paper describing a new model of psychotic experience.

Its August 2014: As my journey of self-exploration, in order to understand and articulate the experience of psychosis from the inside-out continues. With this paper representing a synthesis of all the experiential reseach I've done in the past 7 years. Which has culminated in a model of experience articulated in the spirit of Wilhem Reich's "everyone is right in some way," it is merely a matter of knowing "how."Hence, I present a model of psychotic and mental illness experience, that explores the taken for grantedness of our normal, adult, analogous sense of self, whereby we interpret our lived experience with reference to the external world. Hence, the biomedical model of psychosis and mental illness is based on the analogous assumption of a "fever-type" infectious disease, in my experience. While my lived experience explored the nature of my primary process affective states of being, and the contagion of innate affects. Hence, "everyone is right in some way, its merely a matter of "how." With my transformational journey from chronic mental illness victim to this, from the inside out articulation of my actual experience, raising serious questions of our current consensus on human mental health. Please consider:

Psychiatric Diagnosis: Core Reactions & Reasons

Influential psychiatrists Sigmund Freud & Patrick McGorry
McGorry is "the guru" of early intervention in psychosis.

Diagnostic categorizations in the hands of the educated & therefore “qualified,” yet still emotionally immature, DO have a devastating affect on many people’s lives.

Please consider:
“First of all, let’s back off a little bit from clear cut diagnostic categories because diagnostic categories are totally resultant of a consensus of a series of behavioral and psychological features; so basically, a fever-type model.

What I’m going to talk a lot about are common cores that seem to transcend diagnostic categories.” _Stephen Porges.


Professor Stephen Porges, is the genius behind “The Polyvagal Theory,” (Porges, 2011) which helped me resolve my experience of “affective psychoses.”

In my own first episode of psychosis (FEP), in my case a euphoric mania, my 34 year journey to understand affective psychosis from the “inside out,” may have been happily short circuited, if I’d seen a mature and empathic psychiatrist, like professor Patrick McGorry, instead of the emotionally immature one, who “reactively” pronounced me schizophrenic within fifteen minutes. Of course he’d read the referral letter from a G.P. “Exhibits signs of schizophrenia,” and sadly so had I, and lacking real-life experience, I trusted doctors back in 1980. So did my family and friends, due to the “paternalistic” nature of human societies.

My Mental Illness Journey & Ongoing Recovery

After a traumatic three day birth ordeal, was I born to suffer, Psychosis? Did birth trauma leave me highly susceptible to the experience of mental illness, in a classic early adulthood onset of bipolar type 1 disorder?

Is our understanding of mental illness changing now, as the reality of long term medication treatments, and a still missing genetic causation, are exposed to fresh scrutiny? Are there recent discoveries that are enabling a paradigm shift in our view of mental health and well-being?

In a thirty three year experience of manic-depression, my understanding of the mental illness experience has changed dramatically in the past six years.

Now completely medication free, an intense self-education and self-exploration effort has altered my perception, towards a natural stimulus for psychosis, away from the consensus view of brain diseased, disorders.




This online journal come memoir describes my ongoing journey towards deeper self-awareness and improving self-regulation of my moods and their metabolic energy. Receding further into my past is a previously taken for granted understanding of myself, which sadly, was almost totally ignorant of what happens inside this human organism, known as David Bates. For example; in the past I would think and say the word brain as if I automatically understood the substance of this metaphor, this label. Its like when I say the word chair without consciously acknowledging I'm simply describing the image of an object, with no appreciation of the objects hidden substance. In the past, what little appreciation of my organic nature I did have, was more as a collection of parts, like my heart, lungs, brain and my limbs. If I've learned anything on this self-exploration journey, its that I don't function internally, with anything like the mechanisms of an elaborately assembled clock. An yet, this was the popular symbol of the human brain, (mechanical cogs) until very recently, when its electro-chemical mode of function, began to rise into common-sense awareness.

I certainly had no knowledge of my nervous systems or the hidden and complex chemical reactions that make all the parts of me combine together, as a functioning human being. In fact, the more I've educated myself about the intricate and intertwined substances of my body/brain, the more mismatched these older, parts or object like metaphors seem. I listen to fellow travellers on this journey describe their experience by way of external analogies, like "I feel like I'm trapped in quicksand or I'm drowning in anxiety." Images of the external world which do not accurately describe what is happening inside us. Particularly the common assumption that psychosis is all about what happens within the brain, as if reciprocal feedback signals from the body, particularly the heart have no role in the stimulation of emotions and the mind.

Emotion, being of particular interest to people like myself, who are said to suffer from an "affective" disorder. A disorder of affect/emotion. Further more, my search for understanding and recovery from life disrupting mood swings, brought a deepening appreciation for the limits of my thinking mind, with common sense vocabulary. My ongoing recovery is founded on an increasing ability to give up the life-long refuge of my mind, as an avoidance of a felt-sense of my body and its nervous sensations. In overcoming both mania and depression, I've learned that the foundation of my struggle with bipolar mood swings is primarily physiological, rather than psychological. Essentially, what I'm learning is that madness is a flight from pain, both physical and psychic, yet of the body first and foremost.

My journal/memoir begins in April 2007:>>