This blog will be about my own journey towards a better life.

At the moment I am dealing with severe OCD, and I'm trying to get back to a life without the disorder.

I will share my own personal process here, and recommend things that have helped me or may be helpful to others. I may address mental illness in general/ various mental illnesses.

I may also share other things along the way.

TAGS:

I will tag everything that I write with #mine.

Any creative sort of writing will be tagged with #writing.

Anything OCD related with #ocd.

And I'll try to tag advice with #advice.

I'll also make use of the #motivation tag.

I will try to use tags #tw depression and #tw ocd or other tw tags when I find appropriate, but can't guarantee that no one will ever be triggered. But this blog is definitely for healing.

This is not a hot take. The medication for treating „mental illness/ disorder“ has not been proven to work, in fact there is evidence for the contrary. That any effect is due to placebo effect or something like a sedative effect. That it is not due to it changing a cause in your brain or body (e.g. chemical imbalance in the brain). It is not due to an illness or disorder. No evidence for such disorder or illness after years of looking for it has been found. No biological or genetic markers have been found.

However the medication given to the „mentally ill/ disordered“ can have serious (long-term) side effects. And „psychiatric treatments“ and the medicalising/ pathologizing framework can have serious damaging effects.

Some suggestions for reading:

1. Irwing Kirsch‘s article on antidepressants and the placebo effect, saying that the serotonin theory is a myth (in the trials independently of whether the drug increased or decreased or did nothing with serotonin, the therapeutic effects were the same) and that the antidepressants‘ effect seems to be placebo effect (concretely: type of antidepressant makes no difference to effect, and there is no clinically significant difference between drug and placebo and the statistically significant difference may be the result of an enhanced placebo effect), based on substantive/ clear evidence using meta-analysis:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/

2. Various documents about the „Power Threat Meaning Framework“ by the British Psychological Society which go into a lot of aspects (taking into account psychological, medical, historical, philosophical, social, cultural perspectives) of the issue with medicalisation and pathologizing and advocate for psychological distresses (what in the medicalisation/ pathologizing framework are taken to be „symptoms/ cluster of symptoms“ of „mental illnesses/ disorders“) being ordinary reactions to events where power dynamics play a role, threat is experienced, and the threat is given a certain meaning.

https://www.bps.org.uk/power-threat-meaning-framework/resources-training/documents

3. Google „Psychiatry abolition“.

E.g. some sites I found:

https://psychintegrity.org/does-mental-illness-exist/

It is basically a framework taking into account that there is no such thing (no evidence for any such thing) as a „mental illness“ or „mental disorder“ because there is absolutely no evidence for a biological/ genetic marker of an illness/ disorder and how these psychological issues/ distresses denoted as such are normal reactions to various forms of threat (in which power and meaning play a main part).

Here are some links to different documents about it:

Site from British Psychological Society with various document links:

https://www.bps.org.uk/power-threat-meaning-framework/resources-training/documents

Various documents direct links:

https://www.bps.org.uk/sites/www.bps.org.uk/files/Policy/Policy%20-%20Files/PTM%20Summary.pdf

https://www.bps.org.uk/sites/www.bps.org.uk/files/Policy/Policy%20-%20Files/PTM%20Guided%20Discussion.pdf

https://www.bps.org.uk/sites/bps.org.uk/files/Policy%20-%20Files/PTM%20Overview.pdf