For Sentara to stop disempowering the victims of the psychiatric pill mill
by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher
May 19, 2020
The following complaint was sent on May 19, 2020, to the Sentara Board of Directors: Dian Calderone - Chair, Allan Parrott - Vice Chair, Howard Kern - CEO, Bill Achenbach, John Agola, M.D., Gilbert Bland, Peter Brooks, Esq., (Eric) Frederick Coble, Edward George, M.D., Les Hall, (Sandy) Henry Harris, Ann Homan, Charles Lovell, M.D., Whitney Saunders, Esq., Jeffery Smith, EdD, Michael Smith, Carol Thomas, Marion Wall.
I am a 61-year-old client of Sentara Behavioral Health Services, writing to protest against the fact that psychiatry has turned me into an eternal patient. It has hooked me on antidepressants 1, which I was never told were addictive, but which I'm now told can never be stopped. In fact, when I told my Sentara psychiatrist that I wanted to quit Effexor 2 (after 25 years of ineffective and mind-fogging treatment with the pills), he said that I shouldn't even bother, because an NIH study shows that the drug has a 95% recidivism rate. I have since learned, from folks like Julie Holland and Richard Whitaker, that antidepressants cause the very chemical imbalance that they purport to fix and that some of them are harder to quit than heroin 3, because they muck around with a neurochemical baseline that may take months to restore.
If psychiatric outfits like Sentara can't bring themselves to apologize for turning folks like myself into eternal patients, the least they can do is to make it easier for us to get our "meds" without having to undergo the time-wasting indignity of visiting the Behavioral Health office. What business is it of your young psychiatrists to know my innermost thoughts every three months? Even granting that it's a necessary formality, a virtual visit should suffice for us pill-mill veterans - at least if you'd be so magnanimous as to accept the "patient's" word about their weight, height and blood pressure, rather than checking these in person.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are legal reasons why you cannot give veteran patients this small degree of freedom - but that would only go to show that we pill-mill veterans are being disempowered by the psychiatric establishment and treated like children.
I urge you therefore to consider ways in which the system can change to empower anti-depressant addicts - because we seem to be the one group in America that it's still OK to oppress.
Your forms always ask patients if they've contemplated suicide: The ironic thing is that there is only one thing that makes me sick of life these days, and that is the fact that psychiatry has turned me into an eternal patient, one who has to humiliate himself every few months by telling his innermost feelings to strangers - and paying for that "privilege" too - all in order to merely be eligible to spend still more money on ineffective pills to which he's become addicted.
Talk about disempowerment, what about the pharmacy nonsense that Sentara puts me through? If I have any trouble with my prescription refills on a weekend, your staff seems to be under orders to ignore me completely until Monday - even if I've run out of meds whose abrupt cessation is medically contraindicated. Your rather useless answering service insists that nobody on your staff can be contacted on the weekend for any reason - to the point where I had to falsely threaten suicide 4 once merely to have someone call me. (If Sentara is going to hugely inconvenience me, I feel no compunction in forcing them merely to "take my call.")
In my opinion, your power to prescribe medicines involves responsibilities as well as rights. If you're not going to be around on the weekend in the case of refill emergencies involving addictive drugs, then you have no business prescribing so-called medicines in the first place.
Now that I've had my say, here's what I ask you to do: Please consider any and all ways to empower veteran patients like myself so that we don't have to think of ourselves as eternal patients. For starters, please implement virtual counseling for veteran patients, if the legal system will let you.
Given the Covid crisis, you'd think that Sentara would be asking ME to have my next "counseling session" via WiFi, but no. Even during a pandemic, Sentara does not want to untie the apron strings that keep me in my lowly place as a "patient."
I write not merely for myself but for the increasing numbers of disempowered veteran patients of the psychiatric pill mill.
Sincerely Yours,
Ballard Quass
PS If you really want to help the disempowered, rather than just maximize Sentara profits, please use what clout you may have to call for the end of the War on Plants (which we disingenuously call a "Drug War"), so that folks like myself can have the same access to Mother Nature's powerful mood medicines that folks had prior to the racist Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914.
The Links Police
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, I wanted to hassle you because you're young and black. No, seriously, I wanted to tip you off to this cache of related essays on this topic:
When scientists refuse to report positive uses for drugs, they are not motivated by power lust, they are motivated by philosophical (non-empirical) notions about what counts as "the good life." This is why it's wrong to say that the drug war is JUST about power.
What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.
The best long-term treatment for OUD would be to normalize the nightly smoking of opium at home, not to addict the user to government-supplied drugs that render them impervious to the benefits of the poppy plant.
The first step in harm reduction is to re-legalize mother nature's medicines. Then hundreds of millions of people will no longer suffer in silence for want of godsend medicines... for depression, for pain, for anxiety, for religious doubts... you name it.
What I want to know is, who sold Christopher Reeves that horse that he fell off of? Who was peddling that junk?!
To understand why the western world is blind to the benefits of "drugs," read "The Concept of Nature" by Whitehead. He unveils the scientific schizophrenia of the west, according to which the "real" world is invisible to us while our perceptions are mere "secondary" qualities.
Prohibitionists have the same M O they've had for the last 100+ years: blame drugs for everything. Being a drug warrior is never having the decency to say you're sorry -- not to Mexicans, not to inner-city crime victims, not to patients who go without adequate pain relief...
It's a category error to say that scientists can tell us if psychoactive drugs "really work." It's like asking Dr. Spock of Star Trek if hugging "really works." ("Hugging is highly illogical, Captain.")
If NIDA covered all drugs (not just politically ostracized drugs), they'd produce articles like this: "Aspirin continues to kill hundreds." "Penicillin misuse approaching crisis levels." "More bad news about Tylenol and liver damage." "Study revives cancer fears from caffeine."
At best, antidepressants make depression bearable. We need not settle for such drugs, especially when they are notorious for causing dependence. There are many drugs that elate and inspire. It is both cruel and criminal to outlaw them.
Do you know why I stopped you? That's right, I wanted to hassle you because you're young and black. No, seriously, I wanted to tip you off to this cache of related essays on this topic:
(up)