When temptation knocks

To "Rossa,"

I'm an accounts manager for Schizophrenic.com and PsyWeb.com (part of the Opteama/Deep Dive Media network). We are a growing online network for mental health information and resources.

Our team has invested a lot of effort to ensure our visitors receive the highest quality of information and we intend to continue that service.

We believe a link to your site would be beneficial to our visitors. Conversely, we believe your visitors stand to benefit from a link to our network. Therefore, we would like to add a link to your website, http://holisticschizophrenia.blogspot.com, on www.PsyWeb.com in exchange for a link to www.Schizophrenic.com on your website.

We have other mental health websites on general disorders, conditions, and addictions that may interest you as well. Together we can boost awareness to our online programs with better a link exchange.

Please let me know your thoughts or any questions you may have.

Thank You,

Opteama Health
269 S. Beverly Dr.
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
________________________
Dear Opteama,

Thank you very much for contacting me about linking our sites. I am not inclined to do so for the reasons which I will list below. I hope you take this in the spirit it is intended, which is to educate and inform, not to denigrate.

1. My philosophy of schizophrenia is not mainstream. It is deliberately anti-mainstream. The reason is quite simple. By reading about and paying attention to what former schizophrenia patients had to say, and to people who never wanted to buy into the medical model of illness, I realized that the best chance people have of "cure" for this supposed "disease" is to distance themselves from the medical mainstream.

2. In tandem with this point about distancing from the medical model, one has to be an uncompliant patient, to be the type of patient who does not consider themselves a patient. This isn't just me or former patients who think this. I have heard doctors say this from time to time. Their patients who were no longer "schizophrenic" were the ones who weren't good patients to begin with. This only stands to reason. More and more scientific evidence is emerging about the long term effects of being medication compliant when it comes to neuroleptics, e.g. people die on average twenty-five years early. A quick check of your website showed me that the advice given out is to follow the doctor's orders and take your medication.

3. I do commend your website for being dedicated to schizophrenia. However, there are many people who object to the use of the word "schizophrenic." The reasons vary, but one objection raised is that the adjective is deliberately used by the medical community to equate schizophrenia with diabetes and being "diabetic." The medical community has promoted the myth started by pharma that people diagnosed with schizophrenia need their medications just like a diabetic needs insulin. This is absolutely untrue. The falsehood was revealed in an interview with a pharmaceutical executive in Robert Whitaker's 2010 bestseller, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America.

4. I do have a link to another medical community on my website that I plan to eventually take down. I was asked to link to their site very early on in my blog and I did so, figuring there was nothing to lose. However, I have been unable to find my own blog on their site, and the only way I can do so is to go to my account and trace it back from there. This explains why I get no traffic to my site from their site. Nobody can find it! However, I will post your e-mail and link and my response as a one-off on my blog today.

In short, thank you for contacting me with your offer. If your site changes in future to allow easy access to a more proactive, positive and innovative view of schizophrenia, offering real alternatives to the mainstream, feel free to contact me again.

Yours sincerely,

Rossa Forbes