Anosognosia

A group called the Treatment Advocacy Center is group that advocates for forced treatment arguing that people who were given psychiatric labels like bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia sometimes become dangerous and lack insight into their illness. This group makes it sound like the number one reason why someone would stop taking extremely harmful, intolerable and ineffective drugs is a lack of insight into their illness. This is a group that often over hypes violence to further it's forced treatment agenda. In a debate with Judi Chamberlin of the National Empowerment Center on forced treatment, psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center states this about the part of the brain impaired when someone lacks awareness of their illness:

Scientifically, it has been shown in many recent studies that 40% to 50% of individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have an impaired awareness of their illness (also called impaired insight). Their illness has impaired the function of the prefrontal cortex, which is part of the brain that is used for self reflection and to appreciate ones own needs.

Is it an illness impairing the function of the prefrontal cortex? Are the drugs given to people in any way to blame for the impairment while on and while off the drugs? In this interview with Nancy C. Andreason she talks about a group of people labeled with schizophrenia that she's been following since 1989. She found that people with schizophrenia are losing brain tissue at a rate of 1 percent per year. The more drugs a persons been given the more brain tissue they lose. When asked why she thought this was happening she stated:

Well, what exactly do these drugs do? They block basal ganglia activity. The prefrontal cortex doesn't the input it needs and is being shut down by drugs. That reduces the psychotic symptoms. It also causes the prefrontal cortex to slowly atrophy.

The folks at TAC may be advocating for treatment that causes the very condition they then use to justify forced treatment.

I happened to see an episode of the Dr. Phil show on bipolar disorder a while back. I don't own a television and I rarely ever watch TV, it's one of the few times I've ever seen the show, probably the only time I ever sat down to watch the whole thing. In it there was a guy named fred labeled with bipolar disorder. They did fMRI of Fred's head and they found that there were a couple things abnormal about Fred's fMRI. First thing they found was that there was damage to Fred's brain that looked a lot like this pattern of brain damage. They also found that voxels representing an area occupied by Fred's amygdala lit up, something they attributed to anxiety that could have also indicated that Fred was happy or sad during the imaging or something else. I saw the show a long time ago, I could be wrong about the pattern of damage or atrophy. It's something I thought readers might find interesting.