No Country for Old Men with a plot twist ✝️ @p82home • serving families affected by serious mental illness with @GeeslingMatthew • cowboy fast-draw
Phoenix, AZ
Joined December 2020
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A THREAD 🧵 HOW DID WE GET HERE?
The day Decarlos Brown Jr. crossed paths with Iryna Zarutska on a NC light rail train ended in tragedy. Minutes later she was dead.
This was not an isolated event. It was the outcome of decades of broken policy on serious mental illness.
The IMD Exclusion is one of the quietest rules in Medicaid law yet it has fueled homelessness, incarceration & tragedy for decades. This thread traces how we got here & why it must end.
My son, who has schizophrenia, knows I advocate for people with serious mental illness but doesn’t understand everything my husband and I do. Tonight, before taking him home, he said about our work, “Mom, remember that there will always be someone more powerful, smarter, and better than you.” 🎯
Deborah Geesling retweeted
Dear Lord, please make it stop. We need competent people in these positions.
Deborah Geesling retweeted
This is a dangerous and frightening choice.
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
science.org/content/article/…
Deborah Geesling retweeted
Sounds like NIMH and its $2.2B budget is going to be in trouble, shirking a seemingly competent Deisseroth lab alum to lead for a different candidate that believes schizophrenia symptoms can be treated by a ketogenic diet
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
science.org/content/article/…
Deborah Geesling retweeted
“Who coined the term Metabolic psychiatry” in 2015 says it all.
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
science.org/content/article/…
Deborah Geesling retweeted
Bhattacharya—an actual scientist & physician should be making these appointments. Kennedy has been a complete failure for mental health policies.
In light of Kennedy’s signal to appoint a psychiatrist focused on metabolic diets as the cure for schizophrenia to lead NIMH instead of a scientist who contributed to Nobel Prize-winning work, this podcast offers excellent historical context and explains why it matters.
I’m not opposed to researching various cures, but this cannot be the primary direction.
Here's my conversation with Andrew Scull, all about psychiatry, its long history from Freud/Jung to today, including asylums, icepick lobotomies, electroshock therapy, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and some horrific treatments that were considered mainstream where doctors injected patients with malaria, induced insulin comas, and pulled out their teeth, all in the name of curing madness.
There are a lot of lessons to learn from history here. One of the most important for me is just how incredibly complex the human mind is, and how hard the task is of understanding & treating the nearly infinite ways it can stumble/faulter.
Humans are amazing. In part, because our minds are such a damn complicated mess.
It's here on X in full and is up everywhere else (see comment).
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction
1:20 - Crisis in Psychiatry
30:58 - Categories of Mental Illness
38:17 - Asylums, Eugenics, and the Nazis
50:23 - The Ice Pick Lobotomy
56:36 - Malaria "Cure" for Syphilis
1:14:52 - Insulin Coma Therapy
1:22:44 - Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)
1:42:13 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
1:59:45 - Freud and Psychoanalysis
2:29:40 - WWII and Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
2:50:14 - Antipsychotics
3:13:35 - Antidepressants
3:26:29 - Future of Psychiatry
Deborah Geesling retweeted
Disgraceful
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
science.org/content/article/…
Deborah Geesling retweeted
“Kennedy wants to offer the position to Shebani Sethi, a Stanford University psychiatrist who has pioneered a relatively new field called metabolic psychiatry, which includes using ketogenic and other special diets to treat mental illnesses.”
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
science.org/content/article/…
Deborah Geesling retweeted
This is going to be a boon to grifters to the detriment to everyone, especially those with SMI. 🤬
Deborah Geesling retweeted
Psychiatric drugs are psychoactive, but so are insulin and blood pressure tablets. That doesn't make them the same as alcohol.
Schizophrenia involves real problems with dopamine that cause voices and paranoia. Antipsychotics target that, which is why many people stop getting locked up, stop hearing things, and manage to hold down a job or see their kids. A few beers have never fixed that for anyone.
It's the same with serious depression. Leave it untreated for long enough and the brain changes. The medications aren't perfect and they don't fix everything, but they lower the risk of suicide and help people get moving again. Coffee doesn't do that.
The idea that something isn't real medicine if it doesn't permanently fix a defect falls apart when you look at half the drugs doctors actually use. Severe illness still needs treatment. – at Delhi, India
Yes, let’s go to all our inner cities and put homeless schizophrenics on metabolic diets. Sounds like a solid plan.
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
science.org/content/article/…
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
science.org/content/article/…
Psalm 37:5-6
Commit your way to the LORD;
trust in him, and he will act.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,
and your justice as the noonday.
Deborah Geesling retweeted
“Our failure to protect such mentally ill people by insuring they receive treatment is a major miscarriage of our mental health care system and a blot on our claims to be civilized.”
— E. Fuller Torrey, American Psychosis
Psalm 37:3-4
Trust in the LORD, and do good;
dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the LORD,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
The families attending this group slay my husband and me. Who are we to walk this road with them?
We are meeting tonight from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm, MST on Zoom. Learn more and sign up here: p82homes.org/caregiver-suppo…
Deborah Geesling retweeted
Absolutely, I keep some of the nasty voicemails respondents send to me when they are being petitioned for AOT. Later, they send chocolates & roses to thank us for saving their life.
Severe mental illness is cruel in that it robs people of insight they need to know to seek help.