Just Say No

Morrissey describes himself now as a "psychiatric survivor." This term is used by people who feel stigmatized, abused, and/or failed by conventional mental health systems and solutions, and who pursue alternative recovery strategies. Prior to the psych ward incident, Morrissey hadn't taken psychiatric drugs, and he hasn't taken them since.

"If the drugs work for some people, that's great, that's wonderful," Morrissey says. "But the problem is, the drugs don't work for some people — I would say they don't work for most people. And for the people they do work for, they only partially work."

At the clinic, the approach to helping people get off meds is gradual. For clients who decide they are ready, Morrissey and Bingham and their colleagues advise them to stay on meds or get back on them until they feel they don't need them, and they design individual weaning schedules for each person based on various factors — the degree of distress, how long they've been on the medication, other physical ailments.

It's fairly well known that going cold turkey off of psych meds is a very bad idea, something Brooklynne Michelle learned the hard way.

Michelle, now 25, doesn't criticize people who use psychiatric medication; she just knows that it's not for her. Her mother once told her she'd read that unmedicated manic episodes could damage her brain. But Michelle is convinced that if she were still on meds, she would not be living and working independently. "So if my tradeoff for that is not living as long as other people, I'm willing to take that risk," she says.

Not long before age 10, Michelle started having severe sleeping problems. For weeks, she'd stay up all night, and then she'd crash and do almost nothing but sleep for days. When she did see a therapist, he diagnosed her with juvenile bipolar in about 20 minutes.

A few years later, a different therapist told Michelle's parents that their child would be bipolar for the rest of her life. He told Michelle directly that she should get used to life as a dependent, because she was never going to be able to live alone, and there was a good chance she would kill herself before age 25. At 15, doctors started prescribing her anti-depressants, which exacerbated her sleep problems. The therapists eventually realized that her case of bipolar was more pronounced on the manic side, and at 18 a doctor put her on lithium and the anti-psychotic Zyprexa. The latter helped her sleep, but two weeks into taking it she woke one morning to the sight of an alligator sitting at her desk, wearing Victorian garb and drinking tea. She started throwing things at the vision and it disappeared, but she called the doctor and got off the Zyprexa. She continued taking lithium for about a year.

"I lost a lot of friends that year because they couldn't handle being around me, because I was no longer me," she says. "I was speaking robot, I had no inflection in my voice, everything was flat. I wasn't happy. I wasn't sad."

Michelle started cutting herself, trying to feel something. It hurt, but there was none of the emotional pain she expected. The big moment came at 19. For two years, she'd been living with and caring for her ailing great-grandfather, and he passed away. At his funeral, she found she couldn't cry. When she got home that day, she flushed all her lithium down the toilet and started planning a move to San Francisco with the $10,000 she'd just inherited.

The emotions started trickling out of her for a few days, and then the dam broke. When there were no more tears, everything shut down. In a move Michelle says she is still thankful for, her mother checked her into an institution. The doctors put her back on medication and respected her decision to wean off. They helped her reduce her dose over a month, for an easier transition than the abrupt approach she'd tried. They wanted her to stay longer, but she was determined to make the flight she'd booked. She checked herself out while on a very low dose of lithium.