“I So Loved My Son that I Had to Promise Him that I’d Do Everything I Could”: Dialogue with Mother and Archivist Julie Wood

Abstract

Are you a parent who has begun to suspect that your child is being harmed by psychiatry? Are you itching for accurate information about psychiatric drugs? If so, read this chapter. In this moving and eye-opening dialogue, you encounter the heart-wrenching tale of a mother who lost her son to psychiatric drugs. Correspondingly, you witness her transformation into a critic, an archivist, and an activist. Other highlights include an introduction to a website which contains accurate information about the drugs and insight into why and how parents might become a critical/antipsychiatry force in their own right.

Julie’s Added Comment

As parents, all of us have things we would like to go back and do differently. For most of us those things are minor, such as missed opportunities—and so there are ways to later go back and compensate for them. Not so for me.

I lost a person I loved more than anything in the world in part because I trusted him—he had always been responsible and shown good judgment—but what is of far more significance, I lost him because I trusted the medical system. There are many wonderful aspects to our medical system. Our family and several other people who I know have benefited greatly from it. Psychiatry is not among the positives.

When I think about what people need to thrive and prosper emotionally—and these are things like safety, personal space, autonomy, respect, intimacy, the chance to contribute, and the opportunity to be heard—I marvel at how easily we have been duped by psychiatry. The point is that what psychiatry either directly involves or leads to is the antithesis of all these good things: Here is a profession that pretends it can improve our well-being by isolating us, labelling us disordered, reducing our confidence, nullifying our opportunities, and drugging us. The drugs numb our emotions, dull our cognition, and stop us from giving “a damn about anything”. They likewise induce sudden rages, make us miserably restless, and take years off our lives. Psychiatrists, moreover, act as if they can intimately know 50 or so people at any given time simply by talking with them in an artificial environment for 45 minutes each week. They claim that in this manner, they know more about what we need than we do. And we buy this?

Strange though this may seem to you, psychiatry is about creating problems, not solving them. We need to observe more critically what is really going on. When psychiatry gets hold of you and you have a bad reaction to the medications that they give you, all the side effects will be attributed to inherent disorders. You run the very high risk of having your life destroyed in what will ultimately be an agonizing, demoralizing process. It’s bad enough when we accept this for ourselves. We should never allow our precious children to fall into this trap.

Insofar as you are able to stop it, do not let anybody, in the name of mental health or however else they describe it, suck into the psychiatric system your son, your granddaughter, your neighbour’s kid, or your godchild. Be vigilant and take in this horrible truth—that the people enter the psychiatric system do NOT get better, they get worse. It is not “in spite of” all the help they receive that psychiatrized children have greater and greater problems as they age. It is rather because of it.

If you want me to elucidate further or you just want someone to interact with over all this, please feel free to contact me at SSRIstories.org. I can tell you about the hundreds of kids who hang themselves every year, the dozens who are shot by police, the many many more whose lives are derailed, all because of psychiatric drugs. And I just might be able to answer some of the questions that you have.