TRANSCRIPT
A few mornings ago, I was sitting on a bench in a park in my neighborhood, which happens to be right next to a large hospital that has a mental health unit, a psychiatric unit. I was reading a book on a bench, and oh, I don’t know, about 20, 30 feet in front of me, there was a homeless guy who was so disturbed. He had almost no clothes on, he was filthy, unshaven, and he was ranting and screaming and crying out and calling out and saying stuff and singing. He didn’t make much sense, and waving his arms and dancing, and just totally in his own world, like not seeming to even notice that anyone else was there, not making any attempt to interact with anyone, totally in the most profoundly abjectly psychotic state you could imagine.
And sitting near me on a bench was a woman in a nurse’s uniform. I looked over at her, and she looked at me, and she said to me, kind of so nobody would notice, but I would hear it, she says, “He needs antipsychotics.” I didn’t really want to engage with her, but what I thought to myself is what I’d like to share here, that actually that’s a common societal thing to say: that guy is so disturbed, he’s so psychotic, he needs antipsychotics. But really, I think he is a product of antipsychotics. He’s a product of our mental health system. Guaranteed, that guy has been in psych wards before, probably been in psych wards in prison too, because there were things about him that, well, living in New York City, a lot of these people do end up in jail, a lot of these folks.
And there are a lot of people like this, just totally out of their minds. “Out of their minds” is kind of a polite way to put it, I think. Since we’re dealing with the subject of antipsychotics, I would say more likely “out of their brains.” What I saw with this guy, this was my feeling, this is my experience, having been a therapist, worked with a lot of people called psychotic, in psychosis, worked with a lot of people who had been on antipsychotics, were on antipsychotics, had tapered off their antipsychotics, were tapering off their antipsychotics.
This guy, what I would say, was going through hardcore psychiatric drug withdrawal, hardcore antipsychotic drug withdrawal. This wasn’t just regular emotional psychosis. This wasn’t just a regular diagnosis of schizophrenia. This guy was next level. And I see so many, many, many homeless people in New York who are like this. They’re just so out of their brains. And when I say “brains,” it’s like the antipsychotics affect the brain. Yes, secondarily, it affects the mind, but really, it affects the brain. It shuts it down, shuts down part of the brain that is intention. They’re called major tranquilizers for a reason, neuroleptics.
And when people say, “He needs antipsychotics,” it’s like, well, I don’t think he needs them. I think actually if we went back in time to what problems he originally had to begin with, I think putting him on antipsychotics 20 years before, perhaps 30 years before, was exactly the wrong thing to do with a person like this. Actually, that’s why I started this whole YouTube channel however many years ago, in 2008, 2009, whenever I put up my first videos. It was showing that people who are experiencing psychosis don’t need antipsychotics and actually are often hurt worse if they get antipsychotics at all.
There are so many better things that can help them. I’ll put a link in this description box here to some of my movies I made because I started by making documentary films about this subject. But I can just talk about it very simply. In general, people need a place that holds them, a place to live that is safe, a respectful environment that gives them choice, a place where they can talk to people, where they can be heard.
So, so, so many people, everybody I would say who is experiencing psychosis has been painfully, painfully traumatized, violated in all sorts of different ways, rejected, neglected, abandoned, and had those things repeated again and again and again and again, starting when they were very young. Horrible childhoods, extremely difficult lives. Like, everybody to some degree or other has had a difficult childhood, but the people who end up psychotic, from what I’ve observed by listening to a lot of people, even watching people, because some of my childhood friends literally went that route later on, and I saw what their childhoods were like, they were harder than mine.
And so just sticking them on drugs and sticking them in a hospital and locking them away from society and forcing them to do things and putting them in straight jackets and restraining them and not letting them see the light of day and leaving them in places that are so deadening and boring and just surrounded by rude, nasty, uncaring, unempathic professionals, because often that’s exactly the type of person who is attracted to work in a nasty, unpleasant, force-filled environment that doesn’t provide nurturance and caring and respect and love.
What’s interesting is the very hospital that was right behind me when I was sitting in this park watching this man. I’ve visited that hospital. I’ve known people who were in that hospital, who were inmates in that hospital, in that psychiatric unit. It was an awful, awful place. I mean, on top of all the other things I just described—the boringness, the deadening, the unpleasant professionals who just will make a quick code if anyone acts out like that, a code where people will come and restrain someone and inject them with an antipsychotic and knock them out.
Aside from that, it was just an ugly, ugly place. But even the ugliness is sort of not even the most important thing, because I have visited some psychiatric hospitals. I did an internship in one back in, what was it, the year 2000, that was beautiful and fancy and had beautiful windows overlooking the Hudson River, and it was gorgeous, and there was nice art on the walls, and it was an awful, awful place.
I heard a client of mine tell me this once. He said he was a person who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He wanted me to make a film about him. He’d seen my first film, “Take These Broken Wings.” He loved it. He pleaded, begged me, “Make a film about me.” I couldn’t make a film about one of my clients, but I can repeat what he said, and he gave me permission to share everything and anything he said.
What he said, he talked about this with the other inmates in psychiatric units. He said, “We are the statistics, and they are the sadistics,” they being the people who work in the unit. Now, it’s interesting. I also heard this statistic: the largest mental health hospital in the entire United States is actually the Los Angeles County prison system. It’s not even technically a mental hospital, but it’s a hospital inside the prison system.
And I’ve talked to so many people who have been in prisons and then get segregated into the psychiatric unit, where they’re forced by injection to take antipsychotics. And then when their time is done, or the same thing happens with people in mental hospitals, regular psychiatric units that are not attached to prisons, when their time is done, when their insurance runs out, when the doctor deems their behavior is calm enough, when their antipsychotics have sunk in enough and they’ve lost their fight and all their post-traumatic feelings have been pushed down and buried beneath a layer of defenses and drugs, antipsychotic pharmaceutical drugs, and they’re deemed free to leave, and they leave, often the first thing they do is say, “I’m not going to take any more antipsychotics.”
And what’s so, so, so sad is then what happens is they go into really hardcore antipsychotic drug withdrawal. And often initially, it feels better to the person. And I’ve heard people say this again and again: anything feels better than being on those deadening, painful, awful drugs, the drugs that, well, can make people twitch and shake and have horrible anxiety, and all they do is sleep all the time. But that initial feeling of wonderfulness of being off those drugs, having drugs out of the system for so many people, especially if it’s a hardcore cold turkey withdrawal from the drugs, can be devastating. It’s even hard enough for people.
Who very, very, very, very, very slowly taper off antipsychotics. And this can go for other psychiatric drugs too. Mood stabilizers and antidepressants certainly. Benzodiazepines can have an extremely difficult, difficult tapering process for many people, most in fact.
And well, I think of the side effects for people when they stop taking antipsychotics, especially if they do a cold turkey withdrawal like so many do. Well, right away, one thing that many people can’t do is they can’t sleep. They become insomniacs. And even if the side effect of stopping an antipsychotic is some of those feelings, the historical feelings that were called psychotic, that got labeled as psychotic come back. It’s certainly not made any better when someone doesn’t sleep for two or three or four or five or six days, or a week, or two weeks. Anybody will go nuts, will go crazy if they don’t sleep for a week or two.
I think of myself. If I get only five hours of a night of sleep for just a couple of nights, I start to become a little loopy. I certainly can’t make these videos. Just to sit here and to think and have a logical train of thought the way I am more or less doing right now requires me to have at least nine hours of sleep.
And then I think of someone who already is quite emotionally unstable, who’s just come out of a mental hospital or just come out of jail, is re-entering society, doesn’t have a place to sleep, often is sleeping on a street in a dangerous city where it’s really, really unpleasant. It can be cold at night, it can be rainy. You have no allies, you have no friends, nobody to talk to. Maybe don’t even know where to get food, don’t have clothes to wear, can’t change your clothes. Your feet are itching ’cause they maybe got wet going barefoot ’cause you got to take your shoes off. I mean, the list of stress about being homeless goes on and on and on.
And then add to it going through hardcore antipsychotic drug withdrawal. Because I have seen this when people have everything going for them, even our inexpensive mental health programs for rich people that their parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars a month for, where they have people looking after them and a nice home and meals cooked for them and all sorts of support and therapy and activities and allies and other people going through it at the same time and groups where they can talk about it. Just the antipsychotic withdrawal alone, in a tapered slow way, is enough to destabilize many people so that they become profoundly psychotic, more psychotic than they ever were to begin with before they were initially and I consider inappropriately put on antipsychotics five, ten, fifteen years before.
And so when I come back to thinking about this man, so out of his brain, deranged as he might be called, crazy over the top, dancing and wild and completely in his own world in this park in New York City, this man representing so many who I see, well certainly in New York, in other cities I’ve visited in America and other places in the world too, where people especially get put on a lot of antipsychotics. I can empathize with him.