'Sane in an Insane World' - Freedomain Radio Interviews Dr Dan Edmunds

Noted psychotherapist Dr. Dan L. Edmunds, ED.D. offers alternatives to psychiatric drugs.

With much compassion and understanding, Dr. Edmunds has an innate ability to connect with distressed persons, aid them through challenges and seek to understand their experience. His work with autistic persons and persons undergoing extreme states of mind is unique and amazing. Dr. Edmunds is controversial and often iconoclastic as he is a critical thinker. He believes that people's experience needs to be compassionately heard rather than being readily prescribed psychiatric drugs and labeled. Dr. Edmunds has not been afraid to speak out and tackle irrationality, oppression, and injustice. From his youth, Dr. Edmunds has involved himself in struggle for human rights and the dignity of persons. He has never been one to back down when confronted with a challenge, and he does not accept things at face value, rather he has a brilliant and critical mind of reason."

Many children and families in distress are seeking alternatives to a broken system that often ignores their experience and only offers psychiatric drugs as a supposed solution. Many are looking for help where they feel they will be respected and treated with dignity and compassion. Many are looking for answers outside of a pill bottle. They do not want labels, they just want to be heard.

Dr. Dan L. Edmunds' is offering this alternative in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Dr. D.L. Edmunds' private practice of psychotherapy for children, adolescents, and adults is located in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. Dr. Edmunds is one of few offering a holistic, drug free, relationship based approach that encourages self determination, autonomy, and dignity. Dr. Edmunds' work has focused on drug free approaches to attentional concerns (what is labeled Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), relational approaches for autism/developmental differences, resolving traumatic stress, assisting troubled children and teens, and helping individuals be able to understand and manage extreme states of mind (schizophrenia, bipolar). Dr. Edmunds has developed the Northeastern Pennsylvania Autism Acceptance Project

that focuses on autonomy, understanding, tolerance, inclusion, self-determination and meaning. It is a dynamic and innovative program serving autistic and developmentally different persons in Northeastern Pennsylvania and offering support and consultation to special education departments, educators, parents, and others. In addition to his private practice of psychotherapy, Dr. Edmunds serves as a consultant to special education departments and as a psychological evaluator for various community based programs for children as well as a forensic consultant conducting assessments of individuals where psychiatric drugs caused involuntary intoxication and has led to adverse events, particularly violence and/or suicidality. He is also involved in conflict resolution and mediation. Dr. Edmunds devotes time to scholarly research of consciousness studies, Comparative Religion and the Sociology of Religion, Philosophy, and Psychology. A committed social activist, Dr. Edmunds works diligently to encourage an end to poverty and a society that is dedicated to compassion, ethics, human rights, equality, and dignity. He had been the youngest legislative aide and later registered professional lobbyist to serve in the State of Colorado. In 2006, Dr. Edmunds established the International Center for Humane Psychiatry to encourage ethics and compassion in the field of mental health and to address issues of psychiatric abuse and promote more humane and dignified approaches towards helping distressed persons. Since 2006, Dr. Edmunds has delivered workshops and lectures, conducted radio interviews, participated in rallies and protests, attended professional conferences and meetings focused on mental health, juvenile justice, and foster care reform and in promoting caring approaches for distressed individuals and meeting our children's true needs.

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[Sterlin Lujan]

Some psychiatrists and psychologist even believe that "schizophrenia" may be caused by a virus. It's because they don't know (and that they can't know) that they keep pulling shit out of thin air. I think what Dan had to say in the video about what schizophrenia is belongs more in the sphere of truth, and it does not try to make it a medical disease, which is the main point. Mental illness are not medical conditions, much less diseases. I recommend reading Thomas Szasz,

[Sterlin Lujan]

Umm no. Cancer as an abnormal growth of cellular activity can be observed and verified on a cadaver at autopsy. Can you verify schizophrenia on a cadaver at autopsy? No. You can't. More so, you can't even pinpoint the neurochemical processes or anatomical structures related to schizophrenia...but this is obvious, because schizophrenia is not a medical condition. I think that it's disingenuous and dangerous to defend psychiatry because the field is destroying lives.

[97lb]

If distressing or harmful "symptoms" are a sign of a disease, that would make grieving a disease. That would make feeling bad about abuse a disease. And what about people who hallucinate and enjoy it and it does not cause harm? Do they not have a disease? Your logic is flawed.

[agun17]

Medication in psychiatry is like trying to fix a software problem with hardware.

[1HumanKind]

That is exactly what makes it a disease. The subjective nature. No "objective" necessary. Do you think chronic pain needs an "objective" marker?

Symptoms are not "supposed". They are, or aren't.

You need to have this discussion with your care givers, not me.

To say that distressing, harmful symptoms are not a sign of disease should reveal the nature of your thinking process to you. That it does not should say even more.

[Transmintosity]

What jonnywhack here is doing is using proof by intimidation, stuffing his sentences with as much obscurantist psychiatric jargon to intimidate the reader into believing. If you want to understand the truth, go read Peter Breggin or Robert Whitaker, and stop reading this guy's unconscionable gibberish. I mean, 'conceptual organisation'!? Read Thomas Szasz, George Orwell or Arthur Schopenhauer, people who see and saw through this kind of gibberish and vague application of words.

[Transmintosity]

You assert a preponderant misconception, that has hardened into dogma, as if it was a fact. It isn't. For decades now, longitudinal outcomes studies have shown that this is a myth, that compared to other treatment modalities, the drugs in the psychiatric armamentarium are often, neurodegenerative in their mechanism of action. The meta-analyses only show the damage, which prejudiced researchers somehow interpret as improvement.

[Transmintosity]

Yes, but there is evidence of a histopathological process that often leads to death. With 'schizophrenia', something I supposedly have, there is no objectively identifiable disease process, no objective marker. Just because a person might experience their supposed symptoms of this supposed disease as ego-dystonic, and causes distress, does not make it a bona-fide disease. 'Cancer' is a label for an observable process, schizophrenia is a label for behaviours someone finds undesirable.