Recovery from "schizophrenia" and other "psychotic disorders"

A great deal of research shows that one of the more common effects of child sexual abuse is “auditory hallucinations” or hearing voices and other experiences which tend to get diagnosed as “schizophrenia.  Yet, the US federal government, on an official website, assists mental health workers in telling people diagnosed with schizophrenia that nothing anyone did (and so this would include nothing a child molester did) had anything to do with the person’s later mental health problems.

So first kids get molested, then the mental health system, collaborating with the federal government, comes along and tells them that their “biochemical imbalance” is what caused the problem, and that the sexual abuse had nothing to do with it!  Excuse me if I think that is disgusting…..

The exact language on the SAMHSA National Mental Health Informtion Center website  includes the following:

“What causes schizophrenia?

“Schizophrenia is nobody’s fault. This means that you did not cause the disorder, and neither did your family members or anyone else. Scientists believe that the symptoms of schizophrenia are caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Chemicals called “neurotransmitters” send messages in the brain. When they are out of balance, they can cause the brain to send messages that contain wrong information.

“Scientists do not know what causes this chemical imbalance, but they believe that whatever causes it happens before birth….”

Is it too much to ask that the federal government, and the mental health system, quit collaborating with child molesters to blame the brains of victims for problems that are actually caused by abuse?

Not everyone who is diagnosed with schizophrenia was molested or otherwise abused in childhood.  There are a variety of ways people end up with the troubles that get this diagnosis, and it probably is true that some are born with increased vulnerability (just as some are born with increased vulnerability to sunburn.)  But it’s an atrocity when people paid to “help” instead provide gross misinformation, and attempt to convince people who often were victims of abuse that this abuse has nothing to do with their current mental and emotional difficulties.