Haldol and Traumatic Brain Injury

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• Erica A

  May 23rd, 2015 at 11:41 AM

  I have been suffering from brain damage from Haloperidol and other anti-psychotics given to me at the time of a ‘psychotic breakdown’ 23 years ago now. For 7 years after this I did not know what to do, how to get on with life because every skill I had developed up to then was destroyed by the drug…which every doctor since then has always maintain was caused by my breakdown. I spent the next 7 years at the hands of psychiatrists who failed to put right where they had mucked up. They tried lots of different labels and lots of different drugs each with a disabling effect. In the end I did a runner from the mental health system and,terrified, all alone and wanting to die, I used every last penny of my own to get free from the system of psychiatric control and fear. I am still here to this day to tell my tale. I know now it was the drugs that damaged me/my brain, and my life since then is one that I would prefer not to have experienced. In short it would have been better to have died at the time of my breakdown. I think psychiatrists should be shot. I have had no emotional life since then, no ability to form relationships, and struggle to maintain enough concentration and mental strength to keep even a minimum wage job in a supermarket down. For someone who gained a degree in psychology, traveled to Spain to teach English, learnt Spanish fluently, made loads of friends and enjoyed my life to that point of breaking down, I think it is criminal to have reduced me to a state where I could barely put one foot in front of the other.(tardive dyskinesia)…and say I was ‘cured’. It makes me wonder why psychiatrists have such a need to keep destroying the quality of people’s lives by using these disgusting chemicals.Do they see you as a danger in need of obliteration? do they see you as a chance for medical research and enhancing their own careers and status in their power hungry medical circles? Why do doctors have to be so arrogant and controlling? Can they not see patients as human beings in need of genuine care at a point of crisis in their lives.Why is it below them to ask the suffering person what they think they need …..and work hard to provide just that….it may be someone to talk to, it may be a consistant care person, it may a place that feels safe to the patient, not a place made safe for staff (to bring their babies into)by drugging patients up to the point of zero life quality and then preventing their suicide. What they actually do is a form of torture. State sanctioned cruelty in the name of protecting society from people who are temporarily unstable. Such is the emotional intolerance of people in the rat race, of anyone experiencing emotional insecurity and difference. It is a particularly British (and I suspect American) solution. Drugs are big business. Men in power in these societies don’t like messy emotions, and these are the people making the decisions. Also maybe the solution lies in surrounding every unstable person with 10 stable people who can tolerate the emotional instability of someone in a confused or anxious state…not just bung everyone with varying degrees of instability together to be controlled by equally instable staff who can see only drugs as the solution as they are inadequate humans themselves to deal with these issues. All I really needed at the time of my breakdown, was a place of my own that I could lock the door and lock out people I did not want to associate with. I needed 6 months off work and someone like the Samaritans to talk things through with. I did not know about them then. I had a strong fight for life , and by using haloperidol the medical profession took that fight out of me leaving me vulnerable, making me dependant on the state for benefits and breaking all ties and relations with my family….my dad had a stroke and the psychiatrist in charge decided that it would be best for my dad and me if we had no contact. What a Nazi!!!! how very arrogant and how very wrong he was. I pray that he will gets gods justice for that! Now, about healing. I currently take krill oil, vitamins and minerals, eat an extremely healthy diet. I ran for 10 years. I am on thyroxine as lithium given to me in the past stopped my thyroid working properly. I have not taken any psychiatric medicine for 20 years, and it was only when I refused these poisons and got myself away from the mental persecution environment of the mental hospital that I started to see things clearly for myself.I keep my life very very simple avoid stimulating environments, have had acupuncture which has released alot of the emotional blockages in my aura caused by the medical profession and the sense of imprisonment they instilled by sectioning me 3 times against my will. Healing has been frightening and difficult, but I can now sleep properly for the first time in 18 years since running away from the hospital. Healing, as with any so called psychiatric disorder requires so much more than the purely physical brain. It is a nonsense to only look at and study the physical. we have emotional, mental and spiritual bodies, all of which need care and gentle nurturing when out of synch with each other. In a few generations, treatment with Haloperidol will be like medieval medicine from a dark period in history. It is no different to taking a sledgehammer to the brain, and could not be more violent and inappropriate to the delicate state someone is in when experiencing emotional breakdown. What about the old christian values of sowing faith and kindness where someone is experiencing fear and paranoia. I have never met anyone, inside the mental hospital or outside who has not felt comforted by a listening ear, a cup of tea and maybe a nice warm fire in winter. The problem is that people have become too busy with themselves to care about others, and in place of community, we now have drugs and whole load of parasites who feed off others suffering and make huge profits in the process!! To this day I wish I was not here. I will remain long enough to tell my story in a book and then I may end my life…at a time and place and in a way that I choose without the intervention of barbaric medical people who think they know what is best for you.In the meantime, I hope this may give you some food for thought.

  Reply

• The GoodTherapy.org Team

  May 23rd, 2015 at 12:22 PM

  Thank you for your comment, Erica. We wanted to provide links to some resources that may be relevant to you here. We have more information about what to do in a crisis at https://www.goodtherapy.org/in-crisis.html

  Warm regards,
  The GoodTherapy.org Team

  Reply

• tamas947

  June 3rd, 2016 at 8:24 AM

  I’m sorry to hear about your story.
  For how long have you been “treated” with haldol, if I may ask?

  Reply

• Marian

  April 4th, 2017 at 10:39 AM

  Dear Erica,
  I am sorry to hear about your story. I hope you find the strength to keep on living and sharing your story. I am in a similar situation, but for me it hasn’t been so long ago that I received haldol. Six years ago I had a breakdown in an extremely stressful situation. I had fear of something indeed fearful: my ex threatening to hurt me and our baby son. All they had to offer to help me was medication – lorazepam, haldol, efexor, zoloft, zyprexa… I have been on all of them at different times, for years. Each time I quit the meds, I had a rebound response and was more sick than before I started them. Right now I have quit the medication. I’m doing horribly. I have lots of psychotic fears I didn’t have before starting them. Also I have severe anhedonia: like you I am not capable of having an emotional or social life. My spiritual life has died as well. I can’t feel joy, connection to people, God or nature, happiness, euphoria. Psychiatry took that from me, which imho is the worst crime you can do to anyone. I’m not alive anymore, I am a robot. Like you I had rather they had left me untreated and fearful or even dead. Every fear is better than the horror of this haldol-induced zombiestate. I still hope to regain some of my previous emotional/social/spiritual life, but I am so afraid that like you, this is it for the rest of my life.

  Haldol and psychiatry should be stopped. People should know the horrors of psychiatry. I hope anyone who reads these comments will start to think for themselves and never use haldol on themselves or others.

  Reply

• Carrie

  May 7th, 2017 at 5:43 AM

  Erica and Marian,
  I know just how you feel, or don’t feel. I had my life hijacked and ruined by psychiatrists as well. One of them was on “probation” at the time, and the other one is now on probation. Both should be in prison. Neither should have been practicing medicine at the time I saw them. There was nothing wrong with me other than the effects of discontinuing Effexor, and I was only on that because I’d been so strongly opposed to a change in my cancer treatment the year before that my oncologist sent me to a psychiatrist. I turned out to have been right about the change in my treatment. It reversed my near-recovery and caused the cancer to grow again, which required a devastating but successful surgery. Why I bothered to undergo 17 months of cancer treatment only to fall into the arms of psychiatry is a good question. You’d think life would be rosy after you cheated a death sentence, which, having had metastatic cancer, I did.

  A few months later, with no follow up from the hospital psychiatrist who’d prescribed the Effexor, I ran out of it and stopped it. I went into a state of panic and hyperactivity that actually went away by itself, but which caused me to be hospitalized. I was calm and normal for three days, but told to see a psychiatrist upon discharge. (In fact the head nurse was so pleased with my helpfulness and kindness that she asked me if I could go back and work for her.) The psychiatrist I saw, had, unbeknownst to me, been put on probation for drugging and raping a drug rep he was cheating on his wife with and prescribing drugs for. She accused him off rape but he was disciplined for sexual relations with a patient, as well as self-prescribing recreational drugs, incompetence, negligence, and corruption and dishonesty He said I was “bipolar” and prescribed an off-label epilepsy drug that Novartis was later fined for bribing doctors to prescribe for off-label use in “bipolar.” There was no evidence it worked and there is still no evidence it works. It made me far worse, and all efforts to fix me with drugs after that were damaging in some way. I finally “escaped” too, but suffered almost two years of post-drug syndrome, my last set of drugs being two stimulants prescribed at the same time for supposed ADHD! I think I had dopamine agonist withdrawal syndrome. I believed avoidance of drugs was the only way to get better, but what a grueling period followed. Awakening at 4:30 am after finally falling sleep around 2:30 or 3:00 am, I should add. I was never drowsy, always 100% alert, so “falling asleep” was lying in bed trying not to think about all I had lost in recent years. I’d awaken at 4:30 in the morning with a pounding heart and a sense of dread and despair so bleak I would beg to be killed by lightening. I am not suicidal and did not want to kill myself then. However, consciousness was essentially intolerable. I tried various supplements and Eastern Medicine and so on. Recovery was a ten day process after I went on a modified ketogenic diet and made sure to have certain dietary fats every day, with almost no carbohydrates. (I’d actually been diagnosed with an unspecified epilepsy disorder after an EEG at the clinic of an epileptologist showed a spike in my right temporal lobe two years before, just after I quit the last psych drugs. I learned about the ketogenic diet’s helpfulness in preventing seizures, and thought it might address whatever ailed me, since at one time, it was so bad I was diagnosed with a seizure disorder)

  My recovery came about ten days after I started adding a heaping tablespoon of virgin coconut oil and some butter with good omega 3 content (it comes from grass-fed cattle) to a cup of instant coffee every morning. I only hoped for improved memory and intellect, but I got the mood cure and the ability to sleep again. Maybe it was coincidence, and maybe it was something that worked for me but won’t work for others. Whatever it was, I got a semblance of my health back, and lost the insomnia and early morning awakenings with pounding heart and dread.
  I lost so much that I doubt anyone would believe it. I was so incapacitated by the drugs I was on at times that I couldn’t pay my bills. I literally could not write with a pen, tear a check out of the book, address en envelope, find a stamp, or mail a letter. By the time I could, too much time had passed for me to sue anyone, and those lawsuits are hopeless anyway. Lawyers won’t even take them. It’s all blamed on you, as if the warnings about side effects are just fanciful, and no one’s ever been harmed or destroyed by psych drugs. Well, we have been.

• Christa

  February 21st, 2016 at 9:53 PM

  Haldol is a hideous drug that needs to be banned. Instead of creating safety it creates worsening psychosis and brain shrinkage. Ban psychiatry and see a direct Increase in how to live. There is no excuse for any Haldol to ever be prescribed.

  Reply